My feelings precisely. I’ve never purchased any music, crippled with DRM and I never will. Instead, I use emusic to legally purchase MP3 files and if i can’t find it there, I get it by “other means” and I don’t even remotely feel bad about it. Chances are, if I ganked your album, I paid for at least one of your live shows and possibly bought a t-shirt as well.

[comic from xkcd.com]

Moral of the story? Dummies buy DRM!

My general feeling about Metallica is they’re washed up, used, irrelevant and more than a bit embarrassing for many years now. The drummer is annoying and what they put out now is hardly what I would consider Metal, Thrash or otherwise.

From the whining over Napster, back in 2000 to the overall, professional douchebaggery of their drummer, they lost whatever was left of any respect from my adolescence.

Now, I see they want you to pay for the ability to watch promotional in-studio videos of their up-and-coming album. With price packages ranging from $24.99 to a whopping $124.99, with hardly any real value in the products, I’m thinking they’re sounding their own death knell to whatever is left of a paying consumer base that retains more than a couple brain cells.

Since when did a successful marketing and promotional campaign start with requiring consumers to pay? Is the album that bad?

With their bratty and self-defeating stance on digital media and DRM, they basically beg to be pirated. Why drop cash onto their already significant earnings if they treat some of their base as criminals and the rest as suckers? Really, why even listen to them?

I’ve been reading that gizmodo.com is declaring this March to be “Boyccott the RIAA Month“, asking readers to refrain from purchasing any and all music represented by the Recording Industry Association of America—an attempt to hit them where it hurt the most, which would be the wallet for those not in the know. Personally, i find the whole thing a little on the weak side.

Thirty days without purchasing any big-label vomit? Big fucking deal. It’s like it’s Lent or something. After thirty days, it’s back to scarfing cheeseburgers and buying DRM-crippled Justin Timberlake shit. I get that the main point of Gizmodo’s boycott call is to make a statement, increase awareness to what’s going on and what kind of alternatives are there (like eMusic, which i’m liking a lot), but I think limiting the call to one month is wrong.

The RIAA is evil. One month is nothing. Any label that sleeps with them should be subject to boycott, for life. Or, at the very least, until they wisen up, ditch the RIAA and their bullshit DRM scams and stop treating their customers as thieves by default. Fuck them. Fuck their music. Fuck Windows DRM. Fuck iTunes DRM and fuck the RIAA.

If you can’t live without it, steal it. Other than that, use sane and reasonable music stores like eMusic that sell music from labels that don’t have their heads shoved too far up their asses. Don’t give anyone who uses DRM or hangs with the RIAA a thin fucking dime. If you pay money for that shit, you’re being taken for a ride by a company that assumes you’re a criminal and knows you’re a sucker. Every penny they gain in sales is proof to them that people are sheep and furthers this insane business model of lawsuits, inferior products and consumer abuse.

Here’s a very comprehensive and searchable database of albums released by members of the RIAA. Use it as a tool to know what not to buy and what to steal, if that’s your thing.

I signed up for an account with eMusic this weekend and so far, I’m really liking it. Based on a monthly subscription model, I pay a set fee for a certain number or tracks a month. Right now, I’m doing the 50 tracks for about $15.00 package, which works out to about thirty cents a song. The music is delivered in a DRM-free MP3 format and is encoded in VBR at a median of about 192kbps. Normally, I encode at CBR 192kbps, so this works out totally fine. Once I’ve purchased a track, I can download it as many times as I wish, without affecting my monthly quota, which I love.

Since eMusic sells unlocked, DRM-free music, it doesn’t have everything. If you’re a top-20 loser, stick to Itunes. I find that for my musical leanings, just about 75-80% of the bands I like are on eMusic with at least one album. With over 2 million tracks and new music being added every week, I don’t feel restricted at all. In fact, 24 hours and 4 albums later, I’m in a bit of a Black Metal overdose. A good thing.

eMusic uses a download manager application that has clients for most all operating systems. However, the Linux client sucks major ass. Luckily, some intrepid user created a Java application called EMusicJ that does an excellent job getting my purchased music to my hard drive.

I hate DRM. I refuse to purchase from any label that uses it and as long as media companies try to shove it down people’s throats, I will strongly support piracy. However, I also like to able to support bands I like and eMusic is a great example of a sane and reasonable music store. Piracy to me is a protest not a permanent option. Thirty cents for a high-quality digital file seems about right to me. Ninety-nine cents for a DRM-infected Itunes track that you can only download once is a fucking insult and a rip-off. I hear it a lot and perhaps it’s become a bit of a cliche, but who the hell wakes up in the morning, wanting to pay more money for music with less value and use? Not me.

This morning, I checked out Netflix’s new Video-On-Demand (log-in required) service and find myself fully and completely hating it. It’s a joke, except I’m not laughing.

What would have been an awesome service for me, a paying customer is completely useless. To use this service they call “Instant Watching”, I must use Windows XP or Vista, Internet Explorer 6+ and Windows Media Player. I’m not surprised that support for Linux is non-existent, but what about Mac?

This is a service I would have like to be able to use. I do have a Windows partition I could boot, but I’m not going to. I never use it. It’s a hassle. No. Windows sucks. Internet Explorer… forget it. I use Linux. No support for it? Fine, I’m used to that, but what about this nice, huge-screen G5 Mac sitting in my living room? This is what they tell me:

Your system is not compatible with instant viewing
Your computer’s operating system is not compatible with instant viewing.

Try again from a computer running Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista.

To watch instantly, you need a computer with the following configuration:
Minimum Requirements

• Computer running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or higher, or Windows Vista
• Internet Explorer version 6 or higher
• Windows Media Player version 9 or higher
• An active broadband connection to the Internet
• 1.0 GHz processor
• 512 MB RAM
• 3 GB free hard disk drive space

Recommended in addition to minimum requirements

• An active broadband Internet connection of at least 1.5 Mbps
• 1.5 GHz processor
• 1 GB RAM

There’s no love for anything but Windows and I call foul. Microsoft DRM is buggy bullshit and I don’t understand the point of having it in the first place. Yes, doing a bit of work, a person can record streaming media to disk and share it, but honestly, that same person can just rip the DVDs that Netflix sends out in the mail, possibly with better results. Slapping DRM around it and limiting use to one operating system is a joke. It excludes customers and creates an unnecessary hassle.

I hope this changes, but I doubt it. I’m really disappointed in Netflix. This is not a “service”, it’s an embarrassment. If this is the way they plan on doing things, they’re no better than Walmart and they can kiss my ass.

Yesterday, I was given a free CD of the band, “Velvet Revolver“. Pansy-ass cock-rock is absolutely not my thing, but I figured I’d listen to it just for kicks. As I was peeling off the plastic wrapping, I noticed that SONY/BMG was the publisher of the album. Antennas fully perked, I checked out the fine print and sure enough, I had one of those completely fucked up, root-kit installing, DRM-up-the-wazoo CDs of doom and destruction.

Now, since I run Linux, I’m immune to the evil these CDs inflict. On the flip side, I may be immune, but it doesn’t really matter since the CD won’t even play on my computer since I don’t use Windows or Mac which work with DRM. As a result, this CD went straight to the fucking trash bin. No way am I going to sell it or even give it away. It’s fucking poison and the only reason I’m not rip-shit mad about it is that I got it for free and I could give a rat’s ass about the band.

Call me crazy but I’m sure as fuck not going accept or pay money for a CD that will infect my computer with DRM enforcing software and leave a back-door that can open me up for a viral infection and compromise my personal data just to listen to a fucking music album. Furthermore, I’m not going to use an OS who’s terms of use stipulate that in order to use my computer, my rights go out the window and I have to drop panties and bend over my keyboard and self-sodomize myself with my mouse in order to appease the corporate gods because while I may have purchased my computer, the operating system and the CD, they own my soul and have patents on my DNA and therefore all rights and ownerships are forfeit.

Fuck that shit with a rusty screwdriver.

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I don’t really watch much television. Law & Order, Grey’s Anatomy, The Daily Show and the random historical documentary or something similar pretty much sums up my time spent in front of the TV when not watching a DVD. I have nothing against it. I could watch those Roman and WWII warfare documentaries all day and I’m a sucker for the “History of the Bible” and “Life of Jesus” bullshit shown almost non-stop on the History Channel and others. I just get distracted or forget to watch them.

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