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July 28, 2006
Why I Download Music Illegally
I haven't blogged in a long, long time and, by way of getting back in the loop I'm forcing myself to write this. That usually means two things:
1) It will be poorly written.
2) It will be uninteresting.
Having resigned myself to these caveats and made the reader aware of them, here it go.
I download illegally, and I think it's wrong. I realize that's a 
contradiction but it's a pretty common one. People often do it often; otherwise we wouldn't have the word "rationalize" in our lexicon. Nonetheless, I have decided to spew my two-point rationalization (you can tell I really do think it's wrong because I not only rationalize it by I have a two point rationalization, had I gone so far as to construct a three point rationalization, then, well, I guess I wouldn't think it was wrong anymore)
The basis for my experience is iTunes and, although this may not be typical, I am going to assume it is.
To begin let me point out an obvious fact: I am a suburban white boy. Suburban white boys grow up amongst a dizzy array of uniformity and mediocrity. As do most suburban boys, but suburban white boys have it worse because well, everybody's white. Not everybody but a plurality of Americans and also (I think) a majority, if a slim one.
Right about seventh grade, we all noticed how cool a band T-Shirt was. It meant that you had been to that record store in the seedy part of the nearby city or better you had actually been to a concert. And not everybody had them, at least to start with. So we all started getting them. Then we took this distinguishing characteristic (which, quickly ceased to distinguish anyone) to the next level: obscurity. The more bizarre outlandish, foreign and esoteric your T-Shirt the better. You only needed two or three other schoolmates to know of the band ; if some didn't you would immediately school them with a scornful "You've never heard of them!!??" and then proceed to tell all you knew about the band, which usually took two or three sentences. Then after schooling enough people you would need to find another such band. My musical tastes have been driven by this odd feedback loop and as such, I now must go to the seedy part of town to buy anything I listen to and even then I scorn their selection as "pop".
iTunes only has those pop anthems, those suburban guilty pleasures that you liked only because they were so mainstream that no one liked them. But that type of music is not what you buy, your friends and your friend's friends already have it. It has made copyright law anachronistic by it's sheer ubiquity. So after not too short a time you go looking for those treasures of esoterica, your personal suburban holy grail. And it is nowhere to be found. When you type in the band name it gives you a Google-esque "Did you mean U2?" and you scoff. Legal Internet downloads are the wannabe hip kid who wore only big name band T-Shirts. I scorned him then as I do now. Illegal downloads have the swap meet factor going for them, maybe one out of 
10,000 users likes artist A but as long as you have 10,000 users then you'll find something of his and he will find something of yours and you've accomplished you goal. Every time iTunes gets a new CD it has to store it itself and, no doubt, go through some rigmarole with the record company.
Anyway, what I'm getting at is I can't find what I want on iTunes. Literally I think I have bought something like two CD's from them in the nine months I used legal downloading. Which Leads into point 2.
I used to have Comcast high speed internet. It is rarely high speed and even occasionally not Internet. When I was about to move into my new place I had some friends over and, as is my suburban white boy way, I found a band that they didn't know that I was fond of (In all seriousness, east coast people really don't know anything about west coast music). So I found the album in question and clicked on it in iTunes. The song loaded for an unusually long time, then informed me that, as my internet was offline it could not verify that I actually owned this album that I had paid for. I was angry. I had done things right, I had legitimately purchased this album online and here I was being punished for it. This can never happen when you download illegally. Once you have, it's yours. There's no online verification, no limit to the number of CD's you can burn you may have acquired it illegally, but it's yours now. Legally download music and you still don't own it in the same way.
Shortly thereafter, my hard drive crashed. This happens. My computer was rather old. But I had had all my music on my iPod, luckily. But after getting a new hard drive and installing iTunes, when I plugged in my iPod, iTunes wanted to erase all the music on it. I refused, of course. After that I went to the Apple store, Macs being a total mystery to me, and the clerk told me what was clearly company policy: "The iPod is not a backup device." He seemed nice and so I explained to him that this was all music I legitimately owned and thus I 
wouldn't be stealing it if I got it off my iPod. He was cool and told me "off the record" that you could easily buy illegal "iPod rip" programs off the internet for $10. I bristled at the thought of re-paying for music I legally owned. And resented the fact that I was forced to do it illegally. That was really the last straw.
I still use iTunes but, due to the one drawback of illegal downloading; viruses, I will be reformatting soon and I won't put it back on.
This begs the question "Didn't you say you had an iPod?" And "if you won't be using it can I have it?" Sadly I will continue to use my iPod so there will no raffle between my whopping seven blog readers to give away my iPod. I still use it and I got all my songs off of it without buying an iPod rip program. Turns out that it functions as a removable hard drive if you plug it into a windows machine that doesn't have iTunes. So as it turns out I can use it as a backup device.
Posted by conryf at 04:48 PM | Comments (0)