Yesterday I wrote about why I don't steal games and today I'll focus on the media that got the entire piracy online thinger started: The sharing of music without permission.
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For me, and a vast majority of people alive at the time, it all began with Napster. It was incredibly easy to get a hold of just about any song you wanted without paying for it. Of course you had to be careful because sometimes people would disguise bogus virus files as the song you were looking for. Also, the music industry infiltrated these stocks also by creating a file with the same name that would loop 5 seconds of the song you were looking for and do so for the same length of time as the actual song so you wouldn't be able to tell them apart until you had already downloaded it. There was a lot of trial and error involved, but at the time it was still preferable to what the alternative was.
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worst album ever
In the mid 90's the price of CD's was reaching absurd levels, around $25 or so per one. This was becoming particularly egregious because of the fact that a few people now had disk-burners and we were very aware of the fact that a blank disk costs almost nothing. It was becoming evident the markup on these things was immense.
Rather than try to adapt or forgo any of their profits in a compromise, the record industry decided to sue everyone from the owners of Napster, Bearshare, and Limewire all the way to down to somoene's grandma who didn't even know what she was downloading. It would later occur to me how ironic it was that two of the spokespeople for this movie were Dr. Dre (who uses other people's music for everything he makes) and Lars Ulrich, who would years later be largely responsible for one of the biggest dupings of their fanbase of all time with the release of St Anger, an album that all members of Metallica would later admit they "knew was terrible but released it anyway."
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devious money-making tactics are ok, as long as it doesn't happen to you! Right Lars?
So why did I stop downloading entire albums? I think for the same reason almost everyone else did. It isn't necessary to have a massive music library anymore. If you really want to hear a song you can legally go to Youtube and search for almost anything (except Prince videos for some reason - finding Prince videos is almost impossible.) If you need music on the go a very inexpensive music service like Spotify (which I love) is like $2 a month although I am told the price varies by region.
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Maybe it is different for people in the west but I am not really subjected to new music in any way. I don't know what new music sounds like and the only way I can find that out is to have it kind of displayed for me and Spotify is excellent for that. Of course they are likely incorporating their preferred brands (so to speak) into their choices the same way Youtube features certain content creators, but I guess i don't care. Spotify learns what you like after a while plus the fact that someone can be in the car with me and mention someone completely off the wall like "do you have Off The Wall by Michael Jackson" and the answer is normally "yes, yes i do."
The industry went through a period of intense greed and refused to budge on it. They fought so long trying to discourage the use of digital music in a digital age. CD's were pushed on us well beyond their useful time. The people refused to buckle though and more covert methods of downloading were made such as torrents and this is where the recording industry didn't really have much choice but to give up because you can't win that battle.
Anyway, i think the tl;dr of this can be summarized in this statement. It is easier to pay for it now than to steal it and the cost of the service is so low and this is the reason i stopped stealing music ... and Lars Ulrich is annoying.