I want to buy Busted Stuff, the new CD from Dave Matthews Band, but I find myself hesitating because I don’t know if it’s copy-protected. I haven’t bought new music in a while (I haven’t been hitting the file sharing circuit either, I just haven’t been seeking out new music at all). I vaguely recall that Amazon was marking copy-protected CDs as such, but I don’t know if they’re still doing it. None of the first 50 reviews mention that it’s copy-protected, but I vaguely recall that Amazon likes to censor their customer reviews ruthlessly, and I don’t know if discussions of copy protection are one of the things they censor. I vaguely recall that one of the major record companies promised to start releasing every single CD exclusively in copy-protected format, but I don’t remember which company, or when they said they were planning to start, or whether they ever backed off from that promise. I vaguely recall that some copy-protected CDs don’t work at all in some Macs, but I don’t remember which Macs, or which companies corrupt their CDs in this way, if any, or whether this is the scheme that the record company that I can’t remember promised to start using, if in fact they have started using any such scheme.
I can not be alone in these thoughts. See the damage you’ve already done?
Update: Fat Chuck’s Corrupt CDs doesn’t list it. The record label in question was Universal. Dave Matthews Band is distributed by RCA. Amazon mainly censors reviews that contain links to external sites. Amazon is still labeling copy-protected CDs as such. As explained in Celion Dion killed my iMac, the copy protection scheme which screws up Macs is called Key2Audio. According to Apple (Cannot Eject Copy Protected Audio Disc, Computer Starts Up to Gray Screen), any Mac with an optical CD-ROM drive is affected.
I have ordered the CD and it should be here in due course. The original point stands. One-click
shopping has been replaced by four well-placed Google searches, two internal searches of my own site, pouring through pages of customer reviews looking for anything suspicious, reading Amazon’s return policy to see if they accept returns of corrupt CDs, and hesitantly clicking, once
shopping. This can’t be good for business.
