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Digital Top Stories
File-sharer blagged PlayMPE account to share pre-release music
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 26 April 2010
Well, our recent survey of UK music journalists may not have found much love for the music preview systems currently used by the major record companies, like Share and PlayMPE, but there’s one Aussie file-sharer who’s quite a big fan of the latter. Well, he is according to a post on the AbsolutePunk website. And will be until the point at which they sue him, presumably.
PlayMPE is used by some record companies to make pre-release music available to journalists, partly because it is cheaper than sending out physical promo CDs, and partly because digital rights management is used to stop pesky media types from ripping tracks off a CD or taking MP3s they have been emailed and uploading them to file-sharing networks.
Or at least that’s the theory. One Aussie file-sharer reportedly managed to get himself a PlayMPE account by pretending to be an Australian music critic. Then, instead of doing what most legitimate music journalists do – ie giving up trying to listen to any music after ten minutes because using the system is so frustrating – he worked out how to download WAV files of songs he wasn’t even meant to see on his account (by changing the song ID numbers in the URL). He downloaded said WAV files, made pre-release tracks from the likes of The Black Keys, Macy Gray, Hole and The Gaslight Anthem available via a private BitTorrent tracker, and then bragged about his exploits on a message board.
The last bit was probably unwise, although there’s a chance the unnamed file-sharer hacked into PlayMPE more for a challenge than any desire to access the music inside. Once word got around that a fake journalist was leaking pre-release music via the media preview system, PlayMPE quickly identified the cheat and shut down his account. According to CNET, they are now considering legal action, because presumably the unnamed file-sharer breached a whole load of terms and conditions he ticked on first entering the site.
As previously reported, as they move to digital rather than physical promo systems, the majors are employing various streaming and DRM-protected download systems to give journalists pre-release access to their music. But most systems have proven unpopular and, many reviewers argue, fail to understand that most journalists listen to new music on CD players or iPods several times prior to writing review, so any system that locks a preview to a computer won’t work. Recent CMU research revealed that 75% of UK journalists prefer physical promos, and only 6% were positive towards the streaming systems most majors are employing.
Hmm, record companies pissing off key stakeholders by employing expensive digital rights protection systems that are dead easy to hack. I seem to remember this happening once before.
