by Playfuls Staff |
14th December 2005
The Sony BMG-Rootkit, DRM, XCP (or whatever you might want to call it) scandal is one of the most important scandals affecting the music world this year. And even if everyone's argued time and time again about its effects on both company and consumers, people seem to leave out one of the most affected parties [more], the artists whose CDs are affected by the Rootkit plague.
Actually, they have a problem with Sony as well. Not only that their sales have decreased following this entire scandal, but their popularity too. And that's why some of the artists are taking matters into their own hands.
And one of the best examples is that of the "My Morning Jacket" band who, after seeing Sony's solution for the XCP problem (namely issuing a patch for the MediaMax'd CDs that did even more damage than the original security flaw), has decided to take matters into its own hands.
And thus, according to an article from The Rolling Stone magazine, Mike Martinovich, manager for My Morning Jacket, says that even before the revelation of MediaMax's security problems, his company had been mailing burned, unprotected copies of MMJ's new album Z to fans who complained that MediaMax prevented them from transferring songs to their iPods. "It should have been enough that fans are annoyed," he says. "But this should be the final reason."
Who knows, maybe this is just the first step. Perhaps the solution now is in the artists’ hands, and not in Sony’s. Maybe the artists should rise up and leave this label. But, then again, the almighty US $ still rules the world, and it will be some time before more artists will show the same kind of courage as the guys from My Morning Jacket.
