Dear PureTracks…

Posted on December 3, 2003
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 198 views |

I really want to like PureTracks a lot because I live in Canada and for numerous reasons, most of which stem from the Canadian music distribution industry’s inability to get its own head out of its ass, the iTunes Music Store is unavailable here. That leaves us PureTracks.

But damn they’re making it hard to like them.

I just saw a PureTracks TV commercial in which a bunch of faceless goons in HazMat suits crash through the bedroom of some young punk in the process of downloading pirated music and drag him away. The final tag line: pirated music contains viruses and you’ll die a horrible death if you download them.

In the interestes of public safety, and in the hopes that I may do my small part to prevent what will no doubt be ensuing mass hysteria, I present this counter-message: It is impossible to get a computer virus from an MP3 file you’ve downloaded via the internet. MP3 files are not executable, they can’t infect your computer. For you Windows uses this means that files that end in .mp3 are ok, files that end in .exe are not. When your Aunt Bertha sends you a cute little file that ends in .exe and she says “run this!”, don’t. When she sends you Insane Clown Possy’s latest as a file that ends in .mp3 and says “play this!”, do.

And finally, and perhaps most pettily, if you head to the PureTracks site you’ll note that they have the TM symbol indelibly stamped into their page titles, sitting right up there reminding you that no matter what their advertising suggests, no matter how pretty their site, no matter how hard they try, PureTracks is still just run by a bunch of entertainment-industry lawyers and corporate boffins hell-bent on squeezing cash from you. So, ultimately, is iTunes but I like that it’s carefully hidden behind a patina of cool (the “why” of this is a completely other post for another time).

Oh, that and the PureTracks site requires - nay demands - the use of Internet Explorer despite the fact that we are mere days from 2004, any browser worth its weight in bits is fully standards-compliant, and it’s the only site I’ve come across in more than a year that levies that requirement upon me. How 2002. No Safari, no me.

So without futher adieu I say Dear PureTracks: bite me.

Comments

2 Responses to “Dear PureTracks…”

  1. katie on January 17th, 2004 5:41 pm

    Hear, hear. Computer illiterate Mums and Dads might be conned by that ad but the kids won’t be. The FastTrack network laughs in the face of the puny, DRM’d Puretracks.

  2. Scott James on January 29th, 2004 6:44 pm

    I beg to differ on the “MP3s are harmless” point. From C|Net:

    —-

    A bug in the code of Winamp 2.79 allows a specially formed data tag in an MP3 file to cause a buffer overrun in the application, which could be exploited to run any piece of code the attacker wishes. The glitch was posted to the Bugtraq security mailing list Friday by Andreas Sandblad, a Swedish engineering student.

    —-

    As always, never say “never”.

    Nice design here, by the way.

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