http://xkcd.com/979/ :)

Here's a statistic for you. I have an extensive music collection. At retail, which I paid for it, $30000.00+. Yes, that's thirty thousand dollars, more actually, but let's round it down a bit. The split is about equal between CD and vinyl, and some bought online and downloaded for good measure. I'm also a pirate. Why? Because it's an efficient way to trawl and find what I like. How else would I do it? Well, I could go to the physical record store that doesn't stock much, if any, of the music I like. I could fiddle around on a big internet store and listen to low-bitrate 30 second samples via some crappy embedded player. Or I can just queue up the album p2p and get a half decent mp3 copy, figure out if it's for me, and then if I feel that it's worth owning a nice hi-fi copy I'll go and buy one and play it on a good stereo. I'm not alone. This is how people who listen to a lot of music shop for it these days. We are the people who keep indie artists afloat, we are the people who go out and see bands and buy the new album on the way out, we are the reason there is a music industry beyond the pop charts. The big labels and RIAA and whatnot would have us drawn and quartered because we are apparently cheating them, but they just don't understand and to be honest, I couldn't care less.