Comments on: Why It Won’t Work

By: yes

yes — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:26:16 +0000

instead of wasting money on rubbish like this SonyBMG should be spending money on recruiting new and innovative artists. Ditch the old and embrace the new and exciting, nobody wants fucking rehashes of Celine Dion, no one gives a shit about Jessica Simpson’s little sister…hell no one gives a shit about Jessica Simpson….Stop trying to hang onto your little bit of demographic you have left, stop counting on 12 year olds to beg their parents for stupid fucking sound cards and CD’s. You look desperate, Sony, get some of your dignity back and embrace the music not the cash.

By: hay

hay — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 02:17:17 +0000

okay well i got a 15$ itunes giftcard for chirstmas but when i go to enter the code it says i have to log into itunes and i dont have an account and i dont have acredit card so i cant make one? what do i do?

By: Cyber Ranger

Cyber Ranger — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 01:54:24 +0000

I have all the songs I want already. Why should I buy this come on. What were they thinking. I have only one thing to say. Arrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

By: JDG

JDG — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 02:03:41 +0000

here is an article explaining how sony hates its customers.

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=sony_bullshit

By: Bryan Irrera

Bryan Irrera — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 16:18:00 +0000

Just wanted to say that I’m linking to this, ’cause it CRACKED ME UP that it was the first thing I found on the ‘net when I was searching for “Musicpass”. I work at FYE (don’t hate the player, just the game), and we’d gotten an e-mail yesterday about this “exciting new service” that our customers would basically be knocking the doors down to get their hands on…I’d heard of this Sony BMG crapfest but didn’t know that it was the same thing.

Don’t forget: Sony BMG also cooked up the whole “Ringle” thing a few months ago. If you don’t know what the heck a Ringle is, it was basically this: a CD single with a Ringtone built into it. The singles contained anywhere from 2 to 4 songs on them as usual and would have retailed for about $4.99/$5.99 and would include 1 or 2 ringtones and a desktop wallpaper for your phone (whoo-hoo!). Anyway, there was some kind of problem with them (maybe, the fact that they didn’t work with all phones/phone services? or that the CD sleeves didn’t list which phones/phone services they DID work with? Or that the initial titles were just as middle of the road as those above?)

Anyway, we’d gotten a bunch of them in a HUGE shipment in early October for a launch date of late October. I was horrified when I opened the boxes and realized what they were (initial press releases had mentioned only Best Buy and Wal-Mart as the retailers carrying these things). I was the only one in the store who’d heard of them. About a week before they were supposed to launch, we got e-mails in the store telling us to hold off on them because there was some sort of “technical” problem with them and we were going to be sending them back. We sent them back about a week later and haven’t heard them mentioned again. I gather that part of the “technical” problem was the backlash on the blogosphere and I’m sure that this Musicpass thing will be just as stillborn (especially in lieu of the Sony BMG/Amazon deal)…

By: Steve H

Steve H — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 17:25:59 +0000

Sony is a case study for Ted Sturgeon’s law cross-bred with the Strive For Excellence philosophy.

99% of everything is crap.

Sony succeeds at Excellence in everything they do.

Therefore, 99 percent of what they do is not just crap, but spectacularly, profoundly, stupidly crap.

And the other 1 percent is really really good.

By: Snap

Snap — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 22:51:55 +0000

And finally, Sony wakes up and joins the DRM free revolution:

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1095117&highlight=

By: Stefan

Stefan — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:43:55 +0000

Asshat.like.no.other

By: Christopher Hawley

Christopher Hawley — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 12:24:01 +0000

#76: Scott, your memory is quite accurate. According to this source, cost was about US$1.25/song. Somewhere, enshrined in a dusty box of Olde Stuff I Haven't Thrown Out, a relic of that system awaits the light of a new millenium.¹ IIRC, the Personics system debuted circa 1984; the timing suggested a last-ditch effort to sweep back the tidal wave of consumers shifting to CDs as the medium-of-choice for audio. Oddly enough, when the equivalent CD-based technology appeared <1 year later, the most common reaction I witnessed was "so what? Tower / LicoricePizza / SamGoody / $RandomVendor already has one of them Perfunky, er Pretunic, no Parabolic — y'know, one of those custom music thingamies. Who needs two of them?" ---------------------------------------------------------------- ¹ Given to me by an astronomer friend, so I never learned its price.

By: Scott

Scott — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 11:49:43 +0000

C.Webb @ 73
A half dozen years later I went to a music store and got cassette tapes written with songs of my choice, colored labels, an album title of my own choice, the liner notes had song & artist names and even the option to include pointless sound-effects! I have an album with several songs I’ll not mention, but the second side concludes with the sound of a large explosion. I really thought THAT was clever when I was 10…
I believe the system was called “Personics,” I don’t remember the $/song, but it must have been low, because I used it at a time when I didn’t especially care about music and my allowance was $2/week… (iirc, a tape had a minimum of 3 actual song-tracks)

And my point is “Yes, of course technology has been going backward.” Plus, I’m sure licensing is much more complicated now, because the record companies are rather more worried about what they let who do and how, and they have significantly more de-facto legal rights to protect (thanks DMCA, you’re the gift that keeps on giving… power to the people most likely to discourage people from becoming intellectual property creators)