I downloaded my first MP3 back in 2000. I’d just gotten a new computer with a 4x CD-RW, and had big plans for my music collection. I wanted to try this Napster thing that I’d been hearing about, to see if I could find a few songs that I’d always liked but hadn’t bothered to by the CDs. I also wanted to rip songs from a few discs that I didn’t really like and sell them. Big plans.

I ditched Napster for AudioGalaxy, and my habit really took off. Not that I was one of those indiscriminate downloaders that would slurp anything and everything; I only downloaded albums that I’d heard about, stuff by bands that I kind of liked but wanted to be sure about before dropping $20 on a disc. See, up to this point I would only buy a CD if I was sure I’d like it; once in a while I’d take a chance on a new band based only on a review or advice from a friend, and that yielded some really great finds, but it also yielded a bunch of crap that took me to used CD stores a couple of times a year. Now, using AudioGalaxy, I could download an entire disc; if I liked three or more songs, I’d buy the disc. If not, I’d just keep the songs I liked and delete the rest.

So here it is, five years later. Both Napster and AudioGalaxy are dead. I no longer listen to the radio or watch any of the “music” channels on TV. Most of my music recommendations from blogs and a few sites offering sample MP3s, and my MP3 player has become my primary source of listening; my CDs are stacked like cordwood in shelves, never taken out of their cases. Some day I’ll sell them.

And yes, I download music using filesharing programs. I let people upload them too. Here’s how I justify it:

1. Last year I bought 40 CDs. The year before that I bought over 60. That’s not many by some standards, but I know that the majority of the public doesn’t buy a CD a week. If the average CD costs $20, that means I spend $800 – $1200 a year on CDs alone. I can guarantee you that I would have bought less than half that many had I not been able to download & preview them before buying. In the last year I’d estimate that downloaded & kept maybe 100 songs using filesharing, so call that ~10 CDs worth. So I gave record labels $100 more last year because of filesharing than I would have otherwise.
2. The recording industry has been screwing fans (not to mention the artists…but that’s for another post) for too long. The album format has been robbing us blind for years; how many of us stupidly bought CDs because we liked one or two songs, and when we got home discovered the rest of the disc was crap? I’ve traded or sold nearly 200 CDs since I bought my burner, and god knows how many before that. Assuming I paid $20 apiece and got $8 for it on resale, I paid more than $2,000 for the privilege of storing a CD that I only liked 1/10 of.
3. Now that the electronic options – iTunes, eMusic, Rhapsody, etc. – are there I’m happy to use them, but so far the selection is shit unless you want the same top 40 pap you hear on conventional radio. So that’s not really an option yet either. Thus, I’m still using filesharing.

Here’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about. For 2 or 3 years I’ve been waiting for Bob Mould to release an album called Body Of Song. He’s been talking about it forever, and I’ve been waiting with baited breath as it promised a return to form after his forays into electronica with Modulate and LoudBomb. Finally, in the spring of this year the MP3s leaked a month or two ahead of the album release (Bob railed against it here and then posted feedback here). I didn’t download it from the dodgy websites, but I picked it up a few days later once it reached the filesharing networks. As you can see by this post from May I fully intended to buy the disc anyway; I just couldn’t wait to give it a listen.

But there was a problem: I didn’t like it. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t my thing. Not surprising; pretty much every band/artist that I like had released a disc I just wasn’t into. Anyway, there were only three songs that I thought were good, and the rest ranged from not bad to…well, vocoder. I know I wouldn’t buy the disc, so I kept three songs and deleted the rest. Normally this would conclude my business with a particular disc, but since Bob pretty much funded it himself (and I have a lot of respect for the guy) I went to eMusic and downloaded the three songs I like. It’s one of the very few times a “legal” music download site has had the music I was looking for.

As for the RIAA, the CRIA and the rest of the industry stiffs, they can blow me. They’ve gotten fat and happy by being the only game in town, and now they’re buggy whip magnates railing against the advent of the automobile. Yes, there are people who abuse filesharing networks and never buy anything; they’re the same people who were too cheap to buy anything before and always just taped (or burned) everything off their friends. But the industry is painting someone like me, who buys more now because of filesharing, with the same brush that they use to paint these guys because they take the simplistic view that downloading is baaaad. Given half a chance they’d sue me.

Time to put them out to pasture. Time for things to change.