The album from which the Rachid Taha single comes, ZOOM, is released in Europe, and if you go to the YouTube page you’ll get iTunes link from which you can buy it. But as is often the case with music I like from other countries, I can’t actually do so. If I were buying the CD, which I may well do at some point, I could simply use my credit card and the internet, pay extra shipping charges, and take advantage of the borderless world of the internet to get the newest release by an artist I’ve been following for decades. There’s an Amazon link, too. Ironically, the digital store is more locked down.
Yes, I know there are ways around these restrictions such as proxies and such, but that’s not my point. I don’t want to have to result to those techniques in order to legally purchase music, just because the record label has decided it isn’t ready to distribute across the pond yet. And most people don’t know how to do take advantage of those methods yet. Make no bones about it, it’s a corporate decision to lock down distribution this way. The artists, with the possible exception of huge megastars, are usually just thrilled anyone at all is actually buying their music and paying full price for it. They love having fans wherever they are.
Continue reading
Tag Archives: DRM
The Bodyguard, Netflix, and Your Right to Access Promised Content
UPDATE: Check with TechDirt for a significant correction on this story. Apparently this video was removed from the streaming catalog before Whitney Houston’s death. While that does mean Warner Brothers did not behave as cynically as I believed, the fact that that there was confusion about the date really rather supports my point. If you expect a video to be in the catalog, you expect it to find it.
If you were planning to watch The Bodyguard on Netflix, you’re out of luck. According to this post on TechDirt, it’s been pulled. Unless you’re a huge Whitney Houston fan, you probably won’t notice. It’s not a good movie and you probably weren’t planning to watch it. It’s got some great music, but the soundtrack is available separately. If you were planning to watch it, you are probably really annoyed and need to make other plans. I feel your pain, because I’ve been there. It happens far too often, digitally distributed media has a tendency to just disappear, usually due to rights issues.
Continue reading
Music in the Clouds
Source: My Grafitis in Tehran (http://my.opera.com/nbt4u/blog/)
A day before that the American Public Radio program Marketplace had an interesting segment on cloud computing and streaming music, but from a totally different angle. This time it is not the users that uploads and access their own files, but rather rather the users subscribe to a huge digital library of music and stream what they want. Most of these services also offer the opportunity for downloads for users who want to be able to take their music offline. The best known examples of this are Rhapsody.com and Lala.com, recently purchased and shut down by Apple. For a monthly fee you can listen to whatever you wan in the order you want. In essence it is a vast online digital library.
Continue reading