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I Can't Play a CD?

Every once in a while I will realize I have some CDs that I haven't ripped yet. I'll take a minute to rip a few and enjoy the idea I've increased my digital music catalog. Today, The Pixies record Doolittle came up for ripping. I put it in my computer and nothing really happened. My drive spun, iTunes seemed to want to do something, but nothing came of it. Having used Windows for a while, I took a stab at ejecting the disk and trying again. No luck.

While I can't confirm anything, my guess is that the CD has some stupid DRM that is stopping me from using it on my computer. This is frustrating to say the least. Even if I just wanted to listen to the CD in my computer, I'd be out of luck. Nowadays, we don't even have a stereo. Instead we opted to just use an older laptop as something of a media station. If this had been a happening get together and everyone wanted to play ping pong while getting down to Debaser, the party could come to a screeching halt.

I see why businesses want to "protect" their investments. A business spends its time and money creating something of value in order to make more money. Allowing people to copy or use their product without getting paid hurts the business as well as everyone else who must make up for the lost revenue.

The problem is that there is a blurry line between protecting your investment and not competing. DRM is an effort to remove the requirement to compete in the market. The concern is that their product is not good enough to warrant being paid for, so measures need to be taken in order to stop competition. This is a bad idea of course because the consumer suffers and it lowers the bar in terms of product quality.

Thinking of the current state of the music industry, it makes me wonder. Are labels actually struggling for money simply because the quality of the work is poor? Is the real issue with the lack of money in CD sales the fact that the majority of CDs don't end up meeting the demand due to the quality? I'm sure this is a simplified argument, but it still seems at least partially true.

Music industry postulating aside, it was pretty frustrating my CD wouldn't play.