Offering Incentives To Get People To Buy Into Copy Protection Experience
from the making-things-worse dept
The latest company to jump on the CD copy protection bandwagon is Sony who will be selling new CDs with copy protection in Germany. They say, though, that they're offering this CD with added incentives to make people want to buy it. This is a little bit good, but mostly very bad. The little bit of good is the slow realization that if you're selling music on CDs, you've got to add additional incentives with it to make it worth buying the actual CD. This Sony system is offering access to bonus songs and concert tickets - but only if you have the CD. The rest is all bad. The copy protection makes the value of the CD go way down by taking away the many uses that people expect to get from their CD. To listen to the music on a computer, you have to use Sony software or Sony music players. Instead of using standards that everyone agrees on, here we have yet another different standard and different format for music. This is making life much worse for the consumer by setting up a world where you have to make an early bet on which company you want to supply your music and then live with it for the rest of your life. If the incentive to buy the CD is access to additional access or materials, then why not do that separate from the copy protection?
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Why screw up the whole disk?
Or why not just have music on the disk in the standard format, but the additional material copy-protected? Then, people will actually have an incentive to buy the CD for the additional material, since the disk can still be ripped for jukeboxes, etc., but the additional material which is only available to those who own the disk is protected.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]