Legal Downloads - More Expensive and Less Flexible than CD

I went to the Manics website yesterday and spotted that they (as in Sony Music) have put 'Digital Albums' on sale in the 'official shop'. Yes, for £9.99 (or £13.59 in one case) you can legally download a Manics album. What does that crisp tenner get you though?

Well, there's three regular albums to choose from - they're the ones that are £9.99. Gold Against The Soul, This Is My Truth[...] and Know Your Enemy are there for that price. A look at the Digital Rights information - what they say you can do with what you're paying for - is eye opening. (This is copied directly from their website, with 'Alt' text showing.)

Play Count: Number of times you can play the music before it stops working.
Unlimited plays

Expiry Date: Date on which music will stop working.
No expiry date on the music

Platform: Number of PCs the music can be played on.
Can be played on 1 PC

CD Burns: Number of times the music can be copied onto CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R as a CD audio file.
Can be burnt onto 3 CDs

Transfers to Portable Player: Number of times the music can be transferred to a Device with Windows Media Player installed.
Can be transferred to 3 portable devices

Due to incompatibility issues between Microsoft and Apple, WMA9 files will not play on a Mac.

So, £10 gets you a collection of files that one PC can play, and that you can upload to play on a WMA-compatible player no more than three times. But you can make three copies on blank CDs of your WMA files that you'd be able to play in a regular CD player. Shame WMA files don't typically have fidelity comparable to CD-Audio, especially when packaged for downloading. And don't even think about trying to play it on a Mac, not these crippled files at any rate. Microsoft is incompatible. Don't think about playing it on a Linux box either, unless you use a Windows PC to burn them as an audio CD and play that instead.

Before you type in your card details and sell your soul to Digital Rights (-stripping) Management, as you no doubt are itching to do, a quick visit to perenial favourite Play.com shows a different set of prices - the same albums on CD, without the strings attached. Okay, you'd have to wait a few days for it to turn up, but if you're an old-timer with a modem, you'd be waiting for the tracks to download for almost the same amount of time.

All the CDs are cheaper than the comparable downloads from Play.com, with the exception of This Is My Truth, which is the same price (but can be picked up cheaper from Amazon and just about everywhere else that sells CDs). Not only that, here's the Digital Rights Management for the CDs:

Play Count: Number of times you can play the music before it stops working.
Unlimited plays

Expiry Date: Date on which music will stop working.
No expiry date on the music

Platform: Number of PCs the music can be played on.
Can be played on anything

CD Burns: Number of times the music can be copied onto CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R as a CD audio file.
Pffft. Whatever.

Transfers to Portable Player: Number of times the music can be transferred to a Device with Windows Media Player installed.
Can be transferred to any portable devices that can play any format

Due to compatibility issues between CDs and computers, CDs will play on just about anything you like.

It's scandalous. They try and charge us more for an inferior product and expect us to be grateful. They want us to pay for them to tell us what we can do with our purchases. It's just plain wrong.

On a side note, here's some information that violates the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) in America, because freedom of speech there has been pissed up the wall in favour of corporations controlling everyone's moves, and this apparently is circumventing a copyright protection system, albeit a very ineffectual one. I've yet to find a protected CD that I've not been able to extract the audio from to turn into MP3s or OGG Vorbis files, provided I'm using a Samsung CD-ROM (or DVD-ROM) and the CDex ripper...