Striking the wrong chord

Record companies have always looked for someone or something to blame for poor sales. First it was cassettes, then it was DAT, DCC and Minidisc. Now it's CD-R.

Of course, when people record onto blank CDs this does have an effect on sales, but the record industry's new toy - copy protection - is already proving absurdly counter-productive. Those who really want to copy a CD can circumvent the systems used (if only by analogue dubbing), while whole rafts of innocents find their legitimate listening spoiled.

"The commercial trials that music companies have implemented so far, and those being launched soon, would appear to do more harm than good," said Sami Valkonen, one of BMG's senior vice presidents, at the International Recording Media Association marketing summit in New York recently.

Without warning

He should know. It was BMG/RCA that released Natalie Imbruglia's White Lilies Island into Europe with copy protection and no warning labels. Significantly, Valkonen is now leaving BMG.

It's probably also significant that White Lilies Island was pressed by Disctronics in the UK, and not by BMG's sister company Sonopress in Germany.

Hans-Dieter Queren, director of pre-mastering at Sonopress, said: "BMG asked us nearly a year ago if we were able to copy protect their audio CDs. Our tests [in Germany with the Cactus system and the HIM album] showed us that the main problem of audio copy protection is compatibility with all CD players and drives."

Hi-fi specialist Linn is now finding that many component suppliers have stopped making CD-Audio drives and are selling CDRom drives for audio players.

Copy protection

The Lilies CD carried only a small-print copyright credit on the rear of the box to 'Cactus Data Shield 200 by Courtesy of Midbar Tech Ltd, Tel-Aviv, Israel'. This means something only to those who have followed the copy protection debate. Midbar is one of four companies (Macrovision, Sony, Suncomm are the others) with copy protection systems on offer to record companies.

The Imbruglia disc is a 'multi-session' mix of 12 16bit PCM music tracks running for 51 minutes 36 seconds, and one data track containing the same music compressed and encrypted by a proprietary process as a 29.4Mb file, and an executable Windows file.

When played on a Windows PC, the executable overrides Windows Media Player and plays audio in very low quality (stereo sampled at 32KHz, with very low data rate 80Kbits/sec). So anyone trying to simply listen to the CD on a PC, without any attempt at copying it, hears only very poor sound.

An Apple Mac running OS 9 says the disc is 'unreadable by this computer'; OS X will not play track 1. A Sony PlayStation 2 also cannot play track 1; a Sharp CD player plays tracks at random. A Philips consumer CD recorder will not make a copy, but it also will not play the original CD. And so it goes on.

A prickly problem

Even after BMG's senior management had held a crisis meeting to find out who had authorised the unlabelled use of Cactus, BMG's press office was still pretending to be "unaware" of any problems. Marketing head Richard Connell was "unavailable for comment". Assistant Annie Kearney promised a comment "within the hour" but failed to come up with one.

The crisis meeting had been hastily arranged after Virgin Megastores apologised to a customer who then posted the apology on Natalie Imbruglia's own website. "We are very disappointed," wrote Virgin. "The fight against copyright theft should never be at the expense of the customer."

BMG head of PR Nigel Sweeney prepared a statement which didn't even mention the Imbruglia fiasco, and just whined about declining record sales. "BMG attaches great importance to ensuring that the copy protection applied should not limit the consumer's enjoyment of music in any way," the company waffled. But this is exactly what BMG did to its customers.

Stick a label on it

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the world trade body for the record industry, then issued a statement from the board of directors. "The IFPI has recommended to its members that all copy protected CDs should be clearly labelled in order to advise the consumer," it said.

Midbar also came out with a statement which claimed that, despite the much publicised problems, there have been only "a miniscule number" of playability issues and "exhaustive testing" has "proved a nearly perfect (99.5 per cent) playability rate".

Universal is pressing ahead with plans to copy protect some new CDs, and Macrovision is promoting a new version of its Safe Audio system which it hopes will disguise the deliberate errors it adds to the audio bitstream.

Hard truth

The record industry is run by people whose main talent is lunch, the computer industry has never cared much about compatibility, and the firms developing copy protection technology seem to understand little about the music and audio industry. It's a lethal cocktail.

Anyone who buys a CD that plays imperfectly should complain and ask for a clean replacement. This will cost the record company hard cash - and the one language that the record industry always understands is money.