MySpace Sucks; MTV Sucks

Thursday has a new album coming out.  But before it’s even released, you listen to the whole thing by downloading it.  To download it, you can either a) visit the band’s official MySpace page and listen to a stream of it, in an annoying Flash-based audio player, in horrendous sound quality, or b) just use any of the P2P networks and download the whole album in near-perfect quality MP3 files.

Taking Back Sunday has a new album coming out, too.  You can also listen to the whole thing before it’s released, on MTV’s "The Leak" webpage.  But The Leak, in addition to being in an annoying Flash-based page, doesn’t even work in any browser except MS IE.  In Safari it pretends to work, suggesting that you download Windows Media Player to play the music, but then WMP bombs out with an error.  In Firefox or Mozilla, you click on the "Play whole album" link in The Leak and it just sits there, doing nothing.  Of course, you can always just fire up your P2P client and download the whole album in near-perfect quality as MP3 files.

This is so irritating.  Why are huge media companies and record labels such freaking morons?  They literally make it as difficult as possible to utilize their services, and if/when you are finally able to make them work, they make it as unenjoyable as possible by making the quality absolute crap.

I’m so frustrated and angered by this, but the thing is, I will always buy the CD once it comes out, because it’s the right thing to do (supporting the artist, etc, even though the labels screw them on that too) and because I want to actually have the liner notes and the high-quality source audio to make my own MP3s.  But lots and lots of people don’t care about doing the right thing, nor about the liner notes or the CD itself.  The labels are only driving away their own profits by being so stupid.