DanTheLewis's Journal: My "Pirate" Voyage

As a music "pirate", I have some good words for all of you at the RIAA.

I don't buy it. I don't understand how downloading music has hurt music buying. The overpackaged, overpriced product that pays for a bloated bureaucracy of marketers, managers, service charges, record executives was never going to survive a little competition.

I also doubt that the people who download music would really be buying all the interesting music they now listen to, or that they would have heard of the pop-idol MTV hacks whose CD sales are declining anyway. I, for one, would never have heard Sting's "Mad About You" in Italian.

Don't believe me? Here, then, is my major music-sharing adventure. And all you friends and family who know the names I will be obfuscating, don't rat me out to the police.

Friend A makes me a sampled CD, with one band I've never heard of and one band I don't listen to. He combines tracks from at least four different CDs. The band I'd never heard of blows me away. I listen to the burned CD for weeks on end every day at work. I am hungry for more, but am not ready to buy any CDs. Who knows if the tracks I haven't heard are good? So for a long period of time, months to a year, I sit on my burned CD.

Friend B hears I like this band and gives me a copy of a live recording of a concert (two discs; it will never be on sale). It is one of the best albums I have ever owned. I listen to it, if anything, even more than the first CD, and make some life decisions. I decide I love this band, and will buy anything they ever make again.

So I buy three of your precious CDs, a concert ticket, and even a band T-shirt. But I don't buy CDs. I don't go to concerts. I don't even buy band T-shirts. But something about them, not you, has resonated with me and I am glad to contribute to their success. And I still want more! I still have a list of CDs to buy, to feed my habit for this perfect band.

All this, notice, is the result of not one, but three CDs worth of songs that friends burned for me. They were file sharing just as much as if I had "illegally" downloaded mp3s.

Why am I telling you this? Because your best bet to get my hundreds of dollars is to promote P2P. It already worked for you once.