Oh, some­one please stop these peo­ple. Even my Sony Eric­s­son (yes, half owned by a noto­ri­ously evil record label) ships with soft­ware to rip CDs into non-DRM’d MP3s that func­tion just fine as ring­tones. What star­tling level of idiocy causes some­one to think that bundling more soft­ware on CDs is a remotely good idea I can­not fathom, but clearly one of the brains in a record com­pany came up with this gem. It doesn’t really affect me on account of pretty much never buy­ing CD sin­gles, but even so… yuck.

If this ever finds its way onto real CDs (i.e. albums), I may just cry. I prob­a­bly spend in the vicin­ity of AU$60 – 75 a month on new albums, which is likely more rev­enue than you’d get if I bought things online… and I reckon a good half the rea­son I do that (aside from know­ing what DRM is and why I don’t want it on my music) is for the pack­ag­ing and asso­ci­ated retail experience. Most recent pur­chases include Gotye’s Mixed Blood, MoS Australia’s Elec­tro House Ses­sions (it’s com­pletely dif­fer­ent from the global MoS release of the same name), Bob Sinclar’s Soundz of Free­dom, and the super duper excel­lent sound­track to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

I have ripped each and every track from them all as WMA Loss­less. I wouldn’t have bought… about three of the four… if it wasn’t for retail CD stores.