A classical symphony of 4 movements is naturally packaged as an integral work. And the consumers, without any coercing from the sellers, naturally buy it as an album. Likewise for opera.

But the pop songs of today? They don't naturally group together as an integral work (generally speaking). If the record companies want people to purchase pop songs in albums, the logical way is to have the artists write a group of songs that form an integral work. And that the consumers, without any explanation required, also feel that the group of songs form an integral work and feel that the proper way to experience them is to play all of them in one sitting and in the order published. That's how classical music fans listen to symphonies, from the first movement to the last. When they occasionally listen to just one movement of a symphony, they are well aware that they are listening to an excerpt of a work. Contrast this to listening to a pop song from an album, no one feels they are listening to an excerpt.

I suspect the zeitgeist of today favours short form music, i.e. a 4 minute song. Song writers convey what they need in 4 minutes. Listeners enjoy taking the bite size emotional journey in 4 minutes. Neither song writers nor listeners look for an emotional journey that takes 60 minutes to walk through (generally speaking). A 4 minute song is a natural unit of consumption and the music business should think of it as a basic SKU and structure their business model accordingly.

here is the source that says the singer actually deleted all the personal photos and emptied trash before bringing in his computer for repair.

watch this CNN interview video with the singer, from 2 min on: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/06/01/ta.edison/index.html#cnnSTCVideo

or read from a transcript: " ... I did delete them ... Yes, all of them. All of them. 6 months later after I had deleted these photos off my computer, my computer broke down. I had insisted, I mean, I had asked my assistant to go and bring the computer to go and get it fixed. Now, what I actually found out after returning to Hong Kong and assisting the police was that they had copied my whole hard drive and then they had recovered my memory. I had no idea that there was such a thing before. I thought that if I had put it in the trash bin and said empty trash bin and it goes [makes noise] and it's gone... forever, but no, it wasn't."

Blu-spec CD is NOT a new CD format. It is just an improved method of manufacturing CD.

CDs manufactured using this method are just like other CDs, playable on all CD players, except perhaps in higher manufacturing quality.

The phrase "Blu-spec CD Format" is misleading.

Put another way, I don't think the Chinese government's goal was to build a bullet proof censorship wall. Their goal was to be able to keep a record of who is breaking it and how often they do that.

From a user's point, you know you have the means to do it, but do you dare to do it?

Let's say you have been breaking it to read NYT for a week now and you get no special phone calls or letters from the government and you don't notice anyone following you on the street, do you think it's fine then? Is your name already on their watch list? Do you dare to continue doing this? How often do you do this, how often is too often for the Chinese government? You don't really know, no one knows. The first time you find out might be too late already.