Word: cds
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...Industries. That meant a drop in revenue of $1.7 billion, the worst in the annals of the industry. Sales in industrial countries like Japan, Germany and Canada took an average 9% hit, while those in developing nations such as Brazil and Poland--drained by an epidemic of professionally pirated CDs--fell as much as 28%. In the U.S. not one album sold more than 5 million copies last year; in 2000, seven albums did. Blame the global recession or a lackluster lineup of singers, if you like. But the industry doesn't. It blames...
...seems, can't get enough of ripping (that is, copying a CD to their computer's hard drive) and burning (creating a new CD from scratch). In the U.S., last year saw a whopping 90% rise in the number of owners of computers with a drive that burns CDs (called a CD-RW drive, short for recordable/writable). A third of all PCs have one; 54% of new computers come with one installed. Half of CD-burner owners, reports Forrester Research, create at least one disc a month. Blank CD-Rs (discs on which you can record only once) bought...
...scale of the home-burning business, however, does not by itself prove that sales are being leached away. A report released last month from research giant Jupiter Media Metrix says the picture is more complex: many burners buy more recorded CDs than they used to. After all, if you really love listening to an album, you're going to want the real thing--lyrics, liner notes and all. Chances are it is the so-so albums--the ones from which you want only one or two tracks--that are suffering...
...Five labels are taking no chances. They are pressing ahead with the technology they feel is best placed to combat piracy in the short term--copy-protected CDs, which have built-in encryption that is supposed to prevent you from copying the tunes more than a set number of times (usually once, which is the labels' nod to the concept of "fair use" copying in copyright law). "Our goal is a level of protection that will keep honest people honest," says Paul Vidich, an executive vice president of Warner Music (like TIME, part of AOL Time Warner...
...market has been seeded with dozens of copy-protected CDs, often without the consumer's knowledge. Most, like Natalie Imbruglia's White Lilies Island, on Bertelsmann's BMG, were released in Europe, but in the U.S., if you bought a copy of Universal Music's More Fast and Furious, the second volume of the sound track from the movie, or Enter the Life of Suella by an artist named Pretty Willie, then congratulations!--you're a copy-protection guinea pig. Critics of copy protection say its side effects are potentially disastrous: the discs may not work...