Michael Patrick Brady

My review of Will Oldham’s new Bonnie “Prince” Billy album, Beware, ran today at the Boston Phoenix.

Beware adds a significant amount of twang to Bonnie “Prince” Billy, emphasizing the country-western influence that’s usually only been hinted at on previous records. It’s a great album from a remarkably consistent and able songwriter.

There is one issue with Beware, however, that did bother me: the copy-protection scheme Drag City utilized.

Now, obviously labels must strenuously protect their content from leaking, especially indie labels which have small, tech-savvy audiences and thin margins. I’ve gotten a number of copy-protected discs in the past, usually with watermarks, which are unique signatures hidden in the audio that would identify which specific promo CD (and specific writer) had leaked it on the Internet. Sometimes, the discs are unplayable in CD-ROM drives, and must be listened to on a dedicated CD player. Usually, leaked versions of albums using these schemes are readily available anyway, proving these efforts to be minor annoyances to the end user (the reviewer) instead of a major deterrent to file sharers.

For Beware, a very high-profile release for Drag City, the label decided to escalate the copy-protection game by using “dropouts.” Every 45 seconds or so, the music on the promo copy of Beware would drop out and a voice would intone “YOU ARE LISTENING TO BEWARE, BY BONNIE PRINCE BILLY.” Then the track would come back in, as if nothing had happened, leaving a gap in the music.

This made it very difficult to take the record seriously while reviewing. It was irritating and distracting, but most importantly, it was futile. As I struggled with my crippled reviewer’s copy of Beware, a full version with no dropouts leaked onto the Internet, two or three weeks before the release date. If Drag City sent dropout promos to writers and reviewers, then one is left to conclude that the leak came from inside the label. Maybe next time they’ll choose to trust the reviewers and tighten up their own affairs in house first.