Copy-protected CD sell very well, but angers many fans

Despite the controversial recent CD copy-protection measures, recent CDs by the Foo Fighters and the Dave Mathews Band which incorporate Sony BMG's copy protection are selling very well with the Foo Fighter's reporting their first week as being their best ever sales for an album.  However, there are quite a lot of angry fans complaining about being unable to put their music on their iPod with about 1/3 of Amazon's 252 customer reviews complaining about the copy protection.  The copy protection only allows up to three CD copies to be made as well as a DRM crippled copy on the customer's PC.

So far, record executives say they are continuing talks with Apple in an aim to license its FairPlay DRM format, however the only progress made was releasing the albums on Apple's iTunes music store.  Unfortunately, this only gives the user the choice of buying the album on iTunes for their iPod with no CD or buying the CD and not being allowed to transfer music to their iPod. 

The EMI Group, which has sold over 127 million copies mentions that they have only had 0.02% of its sales (1 in ~5,000 sales) result in any inquiries.  Interestingly Sony BMG has mentioned that users can get around the iPod restriction by transferring their CD to the PC, burning the PC copy to a recordable CD and then using iTunes to import the burned CD. 

Aiming to curb piracy, labels like Sony BMG, which released both records, are rolling out copy-protected albums in the United States, which let users make three exact duplicates of a CD, and store files on a PC in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media format. But the copy-protection bars users from importing music onto iPods since Apple's Fairplay software is incompatible with Windows. "This (Foo Fighters) CD has a copy protection scheme that makes it totally useless to 30 million iPod owners," wrote C. Anderson of Plano, Texas on Amazon.com's customer review link. "How could a band be so stupid as to alienate such a huge percentage of their fans?" About one-third of the 252 customer reviews of the Foo Fighter CD this week on Amazon, which prominently displays the fact the album is a copy-protected CD, complained about the copy protection.

While an inquiry rate of 0.02% of customers may not seem a lot, that still works out at over 25,000 inquiries and chances are that with this many, there would be many others that are not dealt with yet.  However, as this is still seen as a tiny percentage, it looks like copy protected CDs are here to stay, unlike previous efforts which kept failing and being done away with for a certain period.

Finally, while Sony's iPod work around may work, it results in a double-lossy file conversion in order to just get an iTunes compatible copy:  First the music goes through a lossy compression to WMA DRM, then burned back to CD and finally it goes through a second lossy compression when imported into iTunes.

Source: Extreme Tech