Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: June 14 2003, 17:44 |
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On the copy protection...
I don't personally believe that Mike was told the whole story when he was asked whether he wanted it on the album or not. I've looked at some of the literature from the protection system's current developers, Macrovision, and if you look at it unquestioningly, the system seems like a brilliant idea. Of course, it's full of half truths and neatly brushes over the fact that it's actually not very good news if it's put on your album.
As far as punishing Mike goes, I do have sympathy, but it's his problem - he chose the record company, and he agreed to have the copy protection system to be used on the album. If the decisions the record company are making on his behalf are not good ones, it's not up to the fans to sort that out - if Mike isn't happy because people are returning copies of his album, he must tell the record company that. If I was him, I'd be furious, but one thing I'd not expect is for fans to be putting up with faulty CDs. What fans have to make sure of is that they're getting a fair deal, and not being taken advantage of. It's up to Mike to take care of his side of things, and if he carries on allowing the record company to release his albums in this format, it has to be taken as a sign that he doesn't mind if certain people don't buy it, because this type of copy protection is always going to exclude a certain percentage of the CD-buying public and he should have done enough research on the matter to know that.
The fact that Mike has worked hard on it is really part of the problem - he's worked on creating a top quality product, only to have Warner dumb it down by introducing lots of deliberate faults which they hope we'll be cloth eared enough not to notice. Added to that, it seems the manufacturing in general hasn't been very carefully handled, with what may be quite high numbers of 2 and 4 disc sets containing the wrong discs (like CD+DVD sets actually containing 2 DVDs, and 'complete' sets with 2 copies of TB2) and various problems with the soundtrack on the DVD. I have never seen so many complaints regarding the manufacturing quality of any Mike Oldfield album as I have regarding Tubular Bells 2003, and considering that it should have been a release which the record company were excited about, I can only conclude that they really don't care any more.
If people want to support Mike, buy Music VR, send him presents, buy him a pint when you see him in the pub, but don't put up with any crap from the record company - they're a big enough company to be able to do much, much better.
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