UHFMagazine - 2008-01 - January 2008: selling music online

Sometimes, it looks as if some people in the marketing department of major corporation lives in a different universe.

Monopolistic practices like iTunes have been recently attacked with renewed strength from legal authorities- at least here in Europe.

Sony, that in the original Playstation 2 embedded the DVD-zoning also if technically it was not needed for Playstation games, only to protect its movie business, recently announced that it will sell music without copyright protection.

Probably it is not just for the annoying requests for information and lawsuits in Europe, but also to recognize that they for a long time publishing companies had a good time- they controlled production, forced the use of their own distribution channels- but technology evolves.

It is ironic that users like me, that used to buy quite a few music CDs since the 1980s, stopped buying them few years ago, as the quality lowered and the protections required that you checked every time if the CD could play on your computer or not.

Yes, because as a travelling user, I buy DVDs and used to buy CDs where I am, and I watch and listen first on my computer.

But when I complain about the quality, I talk about both the content and the support: way too many times I arrived to my destination only to discover that the CD or DVD I bought from a regular shop was faulty.