At Last, Someone Gets It

Now’s a great time if you like to get music for free. Record Labels and artists finally seem to be waking up to changes in the music industry and realising that giving away albums for free will create far greater buzz (especially for smaller less established bands) than usual promotional channels ever could. This translates into more people coming to see these bands live, which is the only place where the band might actually turn a profit. There also seems to have been a slow realisation that DRM does not work! It only serves to criminalise the legitimate user and restrict the listening enjoyment of the very fans who gave the artists (and labels) any measure of success in the first place. I can only hope that through campaigns like the Free Software Foundation’s “Defective By Design”, all the CRAP (Content Renumeration And Protection) is removed from music.

So I’d like to personally thank the likes of The Charlatans (You Cross My Path), The Crimea (Secrets Of The Witching Hour) and Nine Inch Nails (The Slip) for allowing the world to enjoy their music in a less restricted way.

On a technical note, special kudos must go to Nine Inch Nails for releasing their latest album in both 16bit/44.1kHz lossless FLAC and 24bit/96kHz PCM Wave. My Bittorrent client is chugging away as I type and I can’t wait to listen to NIN in all 24bits .