Today I bought a few DVDs with the booty collected from my wild birthday extravaganza. (The DVDs were Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, if you care.)

Each disc was encased in security tape along all opening edges. It took me ten minutes per DVD to open them. Ten minutes of my life wasted just so I could look inside and see, oooooh, there’s a DVD.

Now, I understand fully why this tape exists. It’s to prevent morons from opening the case and stealing the disc. Which, by the way is a reprehensible action.

Not because it is stealing. Which it is. And that’s inherently wrong. However, this is a crime worse than stealing. This is the mistreatment of the media. Bad! Bad!

So, you’re a criminal who refuses to plop down $20 for a DVD. I understand that, though the $100 you spent on crack last week was a justifiable expense. But, do you realize that by the time you get home after stuffing that disc in your pocket you won’t be able to watch the disc because of the scratches? Are you an idiot?

Wait. Don’t answer that.

So, I have to pay for your folly by spending a good portion of my day trying to liberate the films I’ve just purchased from their prison of a sticky tape-like substance that is covering every possible surface of the case.

Yargh.

As if this is even an issue anymore. The Internet allows you to download films, if you have no desire for quality (or morals for that matter). So, instead of risking incarceration, you can just download it from the Internet without ever leaving your home. Better yet, you can continue to smoke crack the whole time! Get high while pirating movies!

As an added bonus, now that you are a pirate, you get to use all the accoutrements of the trade. Parrot, eye patch and the right to say, “Yargh.”

Security doesn’t stop at the tape all over the packaging. CDs have this too. But now they are putting encryption in CDs that will prevent you from ripping MP3s of the music and distributing it via the Internet. Worthy attempt, I suppose.

However, this technology has rendered the discs unplayable, in many instances. No better way to alienate your audience than to cause your product to be incompatible with their equipment. Brilliant!

The record industry reports that: “In 2000, music sales dropped 9.3%, from $869.7 million to $788 million. Total revenues slipped 2.3%, from $13 billion to $12.7 billion.“ (Business Week)

Well . . . it’s all the fault of people downloading from the Internet, right?

Sure, I’ll give you that. But I have a different theory: the music that is distributed by the companies that are included in Soundscan tracking sucks ass.

In the past few years bands such as Cowboy Junkies, Tori Amos, Liz Phair, and many others, have been dropped from their labels. In the same time, there have been clones of ‘Nsync, Brittany Spears and Creed have popped up everywhere. Listen to one radio station that plays new music for four hours and odds are you’ll only hear a total of 40 songs. All the same songs. Over and over and over. And worse yet, they all sound the same.

However, I’m sure if you look at labels that promote smaller labels such as Not Lame, Bomp, and others, you’ll find a spike in sales.

Makes you wonder why, eh? Could it be that the audience that these record companies once depended upon is getting tired of the same old thing? Of the next big thing? Perhaps they are searching for new bands. Hmmm.

Let’s look at the CDs I’ve purchased, or been given, during the period of slow down: Stew, The Incredible Moses Leroy, Cloud 11, The Negro Problem, Cornelius, Air, The Wondermints, Cherry Twister , The Auteurs, Sarah Harmer , Linus of Hollywood , Ben Folds . . .

The biggest of these names are fringe. The smaller ones are hard to find. But the music is different, strange, off the wall, experimental.

Of course, I’ve also bought reissues of Elvis Costello’s albums. Discs I already own in one, and sometimes two, different forms.

Who knows? Maybe the music world as we know it will come crashing down. We’ll see.

Wow. I got off track there. Sorry!