Don't buy CDs? I thought that's what people are already doing.

Campaigns to boycott various countries, suppliers and industries are weird things, usually more symbolic than effective and often having unintended side effects. Take this one by a lobby group calling itself Don't Buy CDs. I share their hatred of copy protected discs, not so much because they make some duplication impossible but because they often end up with a one-second gap in the first track on various CD players. My Mac still rips most of the ones I've tried anyway.

There are other broader issues here, mostly to do with who's grinding the organ (record companies) and who's the monkey (artists) and why is it earning peanuts? My humble opinion is that MP3s sound like shit and their downloading and trading commodifies and cheapens the value of music. Live, lossless peer-to-peer file-sharing is another matter as it's mostly fans picking up warts and all gig recordings.

The bottom line here is that if no-one buys CDs, what company's going to invest money in emerging bands? This isn't rocket science.

Enjoy the Don't Buy CDs cartoon (below) from the folks at dontbuycds.org, even if I think they've ripped off Fred Negro.