Ways Record Companies and Bands Rip You Off

(VOL. 339, CHAPTER 212, ITEMS 131A-131C) The new Deftones song, “Back to School (Mini-Maggit),” should be all over KROQ and MTV shortly, if it isn't already by the time you read this. Problem is if you bought the band's latest album, White Pony, any time between its original June 20 release date and Oct. 3, then your copy doesn't have the new song on it. The story—the one their publicists tell us, anyway —goes that “Back to School” wasn't finished when the Deftones had to turn White Pony in and only recently did the band find the time to go back into the studio and complete it. When the peeps at Maverick, the band's label, heard the track, they were allegedly “so blown away” that they not only felt compelled to release it as the band's next single but also decided to reissue White Pony with “Back to School” tacked on. For fans who've already shelled out upward of $18 for “Back to School”-less copies of White Pony, the Deftones have a solution: pop the original enhanced CD into your computer and be linked to a special Deftones website, which will allow you to download the track for free. Mmmm, okay, but unless you can afford the right technology—Net access, enough memory and speed to support downloads, and a CD burner to mix the new tune with the older version of the album (not to mention this expensive gadget called a computer)—then you're pretty much SOL. Your only other option is to buy a second copy of White Pony, thereby artificially inflating the album's sales figures—something Maverick and the Deftones surely can't mind too much. So if you're a poor, pissed Deftones fan (and by poor, we mean if you had to save up lots of pennies in order to buy your copy of White Pony), we suggest showing your displeasure by bringing your now-outdated White Ponys to the band's Oct. 23 show at the UCI Bren Events Center, removing the round disc from the square box (no dangerous edges this way) and sending them sailing onto the stage. . . . Not that it'll do any good anyway because you might just have to buy White Pony again in a couple of years. Last week, the Warner Music Group announced the debut of what's being trumpeted as “the next generation of digital audiophilia,” according to a story in Variety—in other words, the format that's supposed to render useless your vast collection of CDs. The new tech is called DVD audio, something that reputedly offers better sound through a system called Advanced Resolution. Though the new DVD audio discs will be playable in regular DVD players, they'll be inoperable in today's standard CD players—so naturally, you'll have to shell out $1,000 for one of the new DVD audio players, too, before you begin the slow, painful process of rebuilding your music collection. . . . As long as we're raging against the Industry (again!), you did read the story that broke in August about the attorneys general of 28 states who filed suit in federal court against the world's five biggest record labels (Warner Bros., Sony, BMG, Universal Music Group and EMI), accusing them (as well as retailers like MusicLand and Tower Records) of conspiring to fix compact-disc prices for the past five years—a stunt that netted the labels some $480 million, according to a Federal Trade Commission estimate? That, friends, is how a CD that costs no more than $3 to manufacture becomes worth $18.

>>>NO, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, HERE'S A REAL SIGN THAT THE APOCALYPSE IS UPON US Run-DMC are in the studio working on a track for their upcoming Crown Royal album with . . . Third Eye Blind! That plague of locusts shall be arriving any day now. . . .