very true. I was in zimbabwe and I could go to a shop where the guy would select music for me and fill up a 1GB USB stick for $2. that's how many people distribute music there. they plug the USB stick into a TV or into a little player in their car that plugs into the cigarette lighter jack.
some music labels in that area have gone back to making cassettes because its much harder to copy those. CDs get ripped right away
> some music labels in that area have gone back to making cassettes because its much harder to copy those
I love the image of reverting to cassette tape as an illustration of DRM: intentionally selling an inferior product - because you buisiness model no longer fits with reality.
OTOH: I challenge the notion that it is "much harder" to copy cassettes. At least if you're doing it as part of an (illicit) distribution business. Presumably casette decks are a available (why else distribute on cassette?) -- an all you really need is a decent deck, line-out and line-in -- and then you can easily sample and encode how you please. It's easy to detect gaps between songs (silence) -- and the digital recording isn't likely to sound much worse than the same song, playing on a cassette deck.
Now, ripping and giving a copy to a friend, the overhead of the process would probably make more of a difference.
no, its much harder to get gear set up to dup cassettes at any kind of scale. that's exactly why they are doing it.
CD dup is much much much faster, it only takes a few minutes to burn. cassettes are real time, or at best 2x. bigger tape dup machines can dup by projecting radio waves at the tape and do it 100x. but the cafes and internet shops in that are that do pirate copies don't have those. they just do USB sticks and CD rips.
its also a kind of throwback retro thing - cassettes in Africa have been a way of life for a long time and the older generation misses the joy of buying a tape. The labels doing this are real labels recording real bands in proper studios. Its expensive to record and release a record.
> I love the image of reverting to cassette tape as an illustration of DRM: intentionally selling an inferior product - because you buisiness model no longer fits with reality.
Just to be honest, as a musician I find this kind of statement rather rude.