Here at The Daily Campus, we receive a plethora of freestuff from record labels eager for some good reviews. Sometimesit’s little more than a sampler of a group’s latestefforts, sometimes it’s a full album. For the longest time,this mountain of music has remained untouched for fear of what liesbeneath its shrink-wrapped surface of bad cover art and exclamationmark-laden cover letters. After all, if a record label has resortedto sending full albums to a college newspaper, they must bedesperate. But no longer – I have taken it upon myself todive headfirst into this stagnant pool of mediocrity and bring tothe surface the very worst that music has to offer. You may notagree, you may think I’m too harsh, but that’s thenature of this business.
This is Bad Press.
It’s been a slow week here at the Entertainment desk.Perhaps it’s the slow economy or perhaps this column isscaring away potential promotions, but only a handful of CDs havefound their way into my eager little grasp. This is bad for mebecause of the Law of Promotional Music. The Law of PromotionalMusic states that, in any given batch of free promotional music, 80percent of it is merely “okay,” 10 percent is”actually pretty good,” and the last 10 percent is”spectacularly bad.” That last group is the one fromwhich I make my living (so to speak). As a result, if I have agrand total of three CDs from which I need to extract a column, theodds are that none of them are in the “spectacularlybad” category.
It so happens that I do have only three CDs: Mojo Box bySouthern Culture on the Skids, 6th Street by Adam Hood and Splinterby The Offspring. Mojo Box, though not an album I’d go outand buy, is too catchy to be horrible, 6th Street has the sameproblem – it’s too catchy, and Splinter, while not thebest Offspring album on the market, is far from a disaster. Sowhat’s a music columnist to do?
Improvise.
Moonspell – The Antidote
According to Highwire Daze magazine, “The Antidote byMoonspell is one of the best metal albums of the year.” Andjudging by the high praise that Century Media pours all over thegroup in the promotional packet I received, they’re anamazing group, capable of soul-touching, blistering goth-metalmelodies that enchant and delight the senses. The Antidote,Moonspell’s latest effort, is their greatest album yet,reaching for new heights in emotion and angst.
It would be nice if I actually had the album to listen to,however.
Perhaps it’s a smart move on the part of the recordcompany. After all, it does cost some money to send music out tojournalists, many of whom aren’t interested in the finernuances of contemporary goth-metal. “Waste not, wantnot,” as the saying goes.
Then again, maybe they’re simply hoping for some lazy,ne’er-do-well writer to pound out a review based solely onthe two pages of promotional material they sent out. The detailsare all right there – it wouldn’t be hard at all towrite an album review without having actually listened to thealbum.
In fact, I think I’ll do it:
“If you haven’t already heard about the Portuguesemetal scene, you’ll want to forget you had immediately afterlistening to The Antidote. I haven’t heard goth music thisbad since J.Lo’s last album. Wah wah wah, I’m angry andsad, and I cannot be consoled – black, black, black, black,blood death anguish, black, black, black black, my mom was mean tome, black, black, oh look it’s raining, black, black.Seriously, there needs to be a group of people who go aroundhugging goth musicians. Or force-feeding them Prozac.”
There, that wasn’t so hard.
CD Copy Protection
Remember that Offspring promo CD I mentioned that I had? I justtried popping it into the computer to listen to it as I worked. Loand behold, it doesn’t play.
“That’s odd,” I thought. So I took a closerlook at the label on the CD: “Not intended for playback on PCor Mac.”
I did a little research and found out that this disc was armedwith a now-infamous new trick developed by record companies to foilfile-swappers. The CD is embedded with a tiny track of data thatcomes before the music. Normal CD players can skip right over thedata track, but computers are designed to read data first, so ittries to do that. The data, however, just loops around and around,never actually doing anything, never actually finishing. The resultis a music CD that you can’t listen to or access through yourcomputer.
A clever little idea, I must admit, but ultimately only harmfulto the record company. The logic behind this method of copyprotection is pretty simple: If a file-swapper can’t actuallyaccess the CD with his/her computer, said file-swapper can’trip tracks from the CD and convert them into mp3s. Therefore, ifthe songs can’t be turned into mp3s, then the CD can’tbe distributed over the Internet! Hurrah! Music is saved!
The reality, however, is that there is a large, tech-savvycommunity spread around the world who can crack virtually any copyprotection device within days of its release. Only a few days aftermusic CDs with Key2Audio protection (which uses a data track tobefuddle computers) hit the market, it was discovered that youcould bypass the security on the disc with a felt-tip pen and alittle patience. That’s right, with a 99-cent pen, you canget around “the state-of-the-art” in copyprotection.
Here’s the thing – every single song on Splinter isreadily available on the Internet, if you know where to look.People with more patience than me have already bypassed thesecurity, ripped the CD, and bam, next thing you know it’sall over the Internet, baby.
The copy protection, then, is just an incredibly infuriatinghassle, like a vestigial limb growing out of your forehead,dangling down into your eyes and in front of your mouth. Tryhitting the club scene with a giant freakin’ arm coming outof your forehead. Believe me, it’s not easy.
Why, record companies? I don’t want a vestigial limb. Yourcustomers, who are actually paying for the album, mind you,don’t want a vestigial limb. Stop giving us extra armsalready, and give us our music.