Epic Music has started distributing its review copies of forthcoming CDs to reviewers in glued-shut discmen, with glued-in headphones. The idea is to prevent reviewers from ripping the discs to MP3 and distributing them online.
What a dumb-ass idea. Leaving aside the wastefulness of distributing thousands of "disposable" discmen, imagine the reviewer's logistics — trying to manage a workspace where you get several hundred of these things a month, attempting to stack them up on your desk, trying to file them for future reference…
Worst of all, though, is the total contempt for a reviewer's workflow. Reviewers need material in a format that is convenient and malleable so that they can choose to listen to them under controlled conditions, as this reviewer notes:
"I'm a pretty big Pearl Jam fan," said Bart Blasengame, a staff writer at Details magazine who was sent one of the contraptions with "Riot Act" inside. "I brought this discman home with me, and I found a way you could go in the back of the CD and, like, pop it open. So I got the actual disc out."
Mr. Blasengame said he had no intention of making MP3's . "At the same time, if I want to give it a proper review, I'm going to listen to it how I want to listen to it — and in my stereo is where it sounds best," he said.
(via /.)
