You think that's bad.
Who cares? Nobody makes any money from music any more, anyway. So let them make less. Good. They (most) already earn less than minimum wage, if that.
Then only people making money now in the music 'business' (apart from a few well established acts etc.) are the people selling the tools, the plugins, samples, you know, the software.
It's funny, but the software which I paid £150 quid for (Rob Papen Blue II) can only be activated on two machines. And that is it. If you want to use it on a laptop when you go away, you'll need to splash another 150 quid. I do understand that you can't have dozens of instances of the software live at any one time so that different people might be able to use them in the studio, while you are at home etc. - that is common sense. But to have this restriction after actually paying for the software is ludicrous.
On a dual boot machine you can only physically use one copy at a time.
There are cracks of it out there. And in fact, this particular software uses a rather resource draining protection, with all the serials hard coded into the blood exe file, or .dll rather, same thing, it being a plugin. Whatever. Not to single out this particular plugin, but if you did use the crack of this, it would not only cost you nothing, you could install it on as many machines as you like, and it would work faster as it would not be scanning a thousand or so license user's registrations and checking them in the database. Lordy lord lord. How long oh lord, how long?
But other maker's of expensive software are also very restrictive of how many machines you can use their plugins on. It's a sign of quality see. Yet other makers of reasonably priced software, just as high end in fact, allow you to use them on as many machines as you want.
Why am I talking about this in relation to this post? Well, for me, the analogy would be worse than what we have now in regards to the format debacle - it would be equivalent to only being allowed to play a CD on two systems. That would extend to even NOT being able to play the very same CD on the very same player, if you were working on a virtual machine, or a dual boot configuration.
A CD costs 15 quid or less. This software costs ten times as much. But I can't use in on the same machine, in a dual boot config, I have to decide which one, because I had it installed on another machine without reading the terms and conditions. And another thing, they make it very very difficult to find out until you get down to it. I have even mailed them to ask them and they are just as obtuse. If they put it in big bold letters: YOU CAN ONLY USE THIS SOFTWARE ON TWO MACHINES AT ONCE - TWO ACTIVATIONS AND THAT IS IT - YOU WILL HAVE TO BUY ANOTHER LICENSE - I think it might affect sales.
I won't be buying any software that restricts me to just two activations in the future.
So all this whinging about format bullshit is right over my head. You can have my music. I can't give it away. No one is interested, because they are all making music themselves or downloading it for nowt via torrent. And you know what? Good luck to you.
Who cares.