Sony Misunderstands the Term Online

A short while ago Sony announced that they would begin selling DRM-free music available for downloading.  This seemed like a great thing, as it signified the last label dropping DRM.  However, Sony has now given some specifics on how this new offering will work.  Apparently, you will go to a physical store, purchase a physical piece of plastic, and then go home and use that to acquire DRM-free music.  This, of course, is wonderful because it's so different from the current method of getting DRM-free tracks from Sony.  You see, right now, in order to achieve that you have to go to a physical store, purchase a physical piece of plastic, and then go home and use that to acquire DRM-free music.  I'm so glad to see that Sony has really picked up on what consumers want and are now providing it. 

Honestly, given that this is Sony, I'm not too surprised by their complete inability to understand the point of downloadable DRM-free music. If I want to quickly grab a song, I want to hop online, download it, and be done.  I don't want to go somewhere, and buy a little card that will let me go back home and download my music.  I admit that I haven't looked into it to see, but I'm willing to bet that Sony has some sort of proprietary downloader that they will force you to use in order to download their music.  I also wouldn't be surprised if that downloader did all sorts of nefarious things to your machine, this is Sony, after all.  This is one of those situations where I'm not sure if Sony offered this in some genuine attempt to appease customers, or if they created a system destined to fail so they can claim they made an effort, as Duncan suggests.  Since Sony has repeatedly demonstrated their inability to give customers what they want, and their superb ability to screw their customers, either situation is pretty likely.