Christina battles online piracy

We are reading an amazing book at the moment. It is called The Future Of Music and it is all about how the record industry as we know it is dead (boo!) but how everything is actually going to be alright (hurray!). It could do with a few more pictures but it is quite interesting. 

Anyway, one of the central arguments of the book is that record labels should not try and put the 'genie' back in the 'bottle' (don't get your hopes up, this is not leading to a hilarious Christina joke) and that there is no way for record companies to stop people down­load­ing albums.

The authors clearly did not bank on the new album from buxom pop warbler Christina 'Christrina' Aguilera. The double album leaked yesterday and, unex­pec­tedly, it seems Christina has figured out a way to stop illegal downloading.

Here are the key points of Christrina's new approach to battling online piracy.
 

• Make sure your album contains so many tracks that even a potential down­loader who actually quite likes your music might think twice about the mammoth task ahead of them. 
• Free music is all very well, you see — but morality-free illegal down­load­ers have busy lives too. It takes time to download somewhere in the region of 8000 tracks. And once they're down­loaded, you have to listen to them ALL to figure out which ones you are ever likely to listen to again in your entire life. 
• Similarly, only the most per­sist­ent and tragic of MP3 bloggers will bother typing out the titles of and then creating the hyper­links to every song on an album as lengthy as 'Back
  To Basics'. Again, even these people have families, lives, things to
  do, people to see. They will not want to spent three weeks HTML coding
  a list of songs larger than most people's entire iTunes library.
• By cleverly employing very very subtle sug­gest­ive visual messages on your single sleeves, make people think to them­selves, "Hang on a minute! I know this 'internet' and 'MP3' business is supposed to be quite good, but you just can't beat the good old fashioned sound of a GRAMOPHONE. Unfortunately you cannot download a shellac platter — so I will simply wait until said disc is in the shops before I listen to the new Christina Aguilera opus". (Note to Christina: this bit doesn't actually work if, contrary to your 'schtick', your album is, er, not available as a record.)
• It is also important that the first single you release from an album — we refer you again to 'Ain't No Other Man' — is plainly streets ahead of everything else on the album. Doing this means that when the album does leak, the brave few who DO download it will feel a sense of dis­ap­point­ment, and will not encourage others 'via the internet' to download the album. This will obviously boost CD sales!!! 

Thank you Christina.

'Adendum': The album is actually quite good but there is not a single one of you who won't put together their own 11-track version in iTunes and com­pletely bin off the rest.