Pete Yorn’s new album Nightcrawler comes out next week. Ordinarily, I would have already pre-ordered it. Possibly twice. (But probably not.) But Yorn’s on Columbia Records, and they’re owned by Sony, and Sony has a recent history of putting obnoxious software onto its music CDs that can royally mess up a computer. From the news reports I’ve read, Sony has cleaned up its act. But now I’m seriously wondering whether it’s worth it to me to order a CD that might damage my machine. So rather than protecting an artist, Sony’s created an incentive for me to not purhase his work.
And the punchline is, if I decide to purchase it over iTunes to avoid this problem, the artist will likely see less of a cut. What a racket.
Filed in Culture and Media