Not that we didn't think they'd be clueless enough to go through with it, but those geniuses in the music industry continue to find ways in which to make the listening experience as baffling, irksome, and potentially harmful as humanly possible. Operating under the deeply held conviction that buying a CD and then copying certain songs to a custom disc for use in the car or transferring its contents to a portable MP3 player constitutes a mortal sin for which the guilty parties will surely fry for all eternity, the music industry has kindly decided to save your soul by trying to make it impossible for you to commit those heinous misdeeds in the first place. And that's why CDs are now appearing on the market that will crash your Mac as soon as you pop them in the drive.

That's right; the mere act of playing a CD on your Mac apparently counts as a music industry no-no, at least if the latest Celine Dion album is any indication. As faithful viewer Robert Buchanan pointed out last week, Celine's latest release is protected with Sony's "Key2Audio" copy protection, at least in some European countries. And as Celine fans in those geographical markets soon discovered, if they tried to play the protected discs in the drives of their Macs (or even their Wintels), the system would generally crash. Think of the reboot time as penance for having attempted something so naughty. A Hollywood Reporter article has more on this exciting new phenomenon, including details about how, in addition to causing a system crash, Celine's new disc "will not eject using normal methods" and "could unpredictably affect the drive's firmware." Holy expensive aversion therapy, Batman!

Now, we should probably mention that we here at AtAT are about as likely to listen to a Celine Dion CD without being forcibly restrained as we are to plunge Tabasco-coated meat thermometers straight through our own eardrums "because it feels good." Still, that's purely a matter of taste, and it's completely irrelevant to how this whole "protected CD" nonsense really sticks in our collective craw. We don't care if your personal listening tastes run to Celine or Yanni or Winger or collections of Halloween sound effects; if you legally purchased the CD, we really think you should be able to play it on your Mac if you so desire-- and yes, even transfer its contents to an iPod. Call us crazy. (Everyone else does.)

So the next time you're shopping for some new tunes, make sure you check those labels; the affected Celine disc apparently bears the warning, "will not play on a PC or a Mac"-- a warning we soon expect will be appended with "and will crash your system faster than Windows 95 on a Pentium/66 with 8 MB of RAM-- oh, and it might permanently wreck your drive just to make sure you never try to pull this kind of crap ever again." Remember, U.S. denizens, so far apparently the only "protected" Celine CDs were released in Europe (possibly because Epic/Sony thinks that Europeans will be less likely to retaliate with swift and blinding violence), so you don't need to be too careful just yet, but you don't need a weathervane to know which way the wind blows.