But we make the best buggy whips!!!

Hmm. Dinosaur meet mammal.


I think this sums up my disgust with most record companies. For the longest time, I didn't have an ipod, but would have bought tunes online if I could have. But. They. Would. Not. Sell. Them.


So rather than see the shifting of the tide and riding it tsunami-like into the future, they simply tried the old tricks in the face of the coming onslaught.


And no, I don't think you should get stuff for free. Frankly, scratch a file sharer find a communist aka theif, so I'm not at all sorry that if someone got something they didn't pay for, the record companies are coming down like a ton 'o bricks on them. Why not? Don't play if you can't pay.

At the same time, it was like a one pronged attack!! Prong one: Sue the theives! Prong two: Refuse for years to give the customers anything remotely like they wanted!!


Me: "I want to buy mp3s of good quality."

Them: "No. Want a subscription?"

Me: "No thanks. I just want one. One song, I can play over and over again and I pay once. I care about it. A subscription is like 60 bucks a year. It only works well for me if I have more then 60 bucks worth of music. And you only came out with that begrudgingly." I want to be able to make 17 copies for myself if I want. "

Me: How about throw in a ringtone?

Them: You can have any color, so long as it's black . . . .

Really, protect the artists, by all means . . . if that's who you're protecting, and not your phoney baloney jobs. So are they artists for hire or independent contractors or the owners of the product?

And one funny thing about DRM. If you were a computer game player, say 1986-1992ish (and I'm just guessing here), there was DRM of some sort on every game you got. I mean, some of it was flat out odd. Colored sheets of plastic that you laid over a key to get the code to punch in and get the game going.

And then, it pretty much stopped for years. (Although since by that time I was loading games to the hard drive, there may have been some check going on that I didn't know about.) But boy did I appreciate LESS frustration from something I purchased.