New White Stripes album to be previewed on vinyl.

At a time when Internet piracy has forced record labels to keep albums vaulted away under lock and key until days before their release, the record label V2 has released copies of the White Stripes' "Elephant" -- one of the year's most hotly anticipated releases -- to the media a full two and a half months before its April 15 release date.
But there's a catch. Advances of the Detroit duo's album were issued on vinyl, making it much more difficult for would-be-pirates to upload the material to popular file-sharing sites such as Kazaa and Morpheus.

I seem to remember there being a joke in circulation last year about how the music companies had finally solved the problem of music being made available on the Internet by introducing a marvellous new music storage medium called the long-playing vinyl record. It appears someone didn't get the joke... and, of course, the real joke is that being on vinyl makes it harder to whack onto your computer but still not actually impossible; my system is sadly not set up for that sort of thing but other people's equipment obviously is. I downloaded a Bad Brains mp3 the other day which was audibly taken from vinyl instead of CD. Being analogue isn't going to solve the problem...

posted by James Russell | 7:13 PM