Seeker of Truth
06-08-2003, 08:34 PM
The Digital Beat
What the f@*# does Madonna think she's doing?
A week before the release of her new album, American Life, Madonna swamped the Net with bogus MP3s. Downloaders who booted up the songs got a loop of the camouflaged girl saying, "What the **** do you think you're doing?" Cute. Coy. And dumb.
Within days, Madonna had a new message on her site -- "This is what the **** I think I'm doing!" -- along with all the real MP3s from American Life, ready to download, plus a marriage proposal to dork diva Morgan Webb of the Tech TV show Screen Grab. This was the work of a disgruntled hacker who identified himself as an editor of the online zine Phrack. Within hours, Madonna's geek posse took down the site and returned it to its original sassy splendor.
What was Madonna doing? The same thing that artists from Eminem to the Red Hot Chili Peppers are resorting to in response to online piracy: spoofing. Spoofs are bogus MP3s used to disrupt the flow of bootlegs. Usually, spoofs are loops of a song's chorus or beep-laden versions of the original. In short, annoying decoys. Of course, erudite file swappers have found ways around spoofs -- such as naming files to signal that they're the real thing.
As far as I know, no other artists have felt the wrath of hackers; that lashing is usually reserved for the Recording Industry Association of America, the group that represents the major music companies. The reason Madonna was singled out for her spoofs was her posturing, and her arrogant and misguided taunt of the bootleg nation. What the ****, indeed.
More @ rollingstone.com (http://www.rollingstone.com/news/newsarticle.asp?nid=17973)
What the f@*# does Madonna think she's doing?
A week before the release of her new album, American Life, Madonna swamped the Net with bogus MP3s. Downloaders who booted up the songs got a loop of the camouflaged girl saying, "What the **** do you think you're doing?" Cute. Coy. And dumb.
Within days, Madonna had a new message on her site -- "This is what the **** I think I'm doing!" -- along with all the real MP3s from American Life, ready to download, plus a marriage proposal to dork diva Morgan Webb of the Tech TV show Screen Grab. This was the work of a disgruntled hacker who identified himself as an editor of the online zine Phrack. Within hours, Madonna's geek posse took down the site and returned it to its original sassy splendor.
What was Madonna doing? The same thing that artists from Eminem to the Red Hot Chili Peppers are resorting to in response to online piracy: spoofing. Spoofs are bogus MP3s used to disrupt the flow of bootlegs. Usually, spoofs are loops of a song's chorus or beep-laden versions of the original. In short, annoying decoys. Of course, erudite file swappers have found ways around spoofs -- such as naming files to signal that they're the real thing.
As far as I know, no other artists have felt the wrath of hackers; that lashing is usually reserved for the Recording Industry Association of America, the group that represents the major music companies. The reason Madonna was singled out for her spoofs was her posturing, and her arrogant and misguided taunt of the bootleg nation. What the ****, indeed.
More @ rollingstone.com (http://www.rollingstone.com/news/newsarticle.asp?nid=17973)