"A cylindrical phonogram.... wow" barked Jemima

The P2P debate often causes me some cognitive dissonance. I illegally download for a few reasons - i'm cheap being the main one. however i also consume music in rather large quanitites, my vinyl weighs a ton, my CD weigh several foot pounds, my 7" is heavy in my hands.

I have in short paid my dues, and in doing so my god have i bought some crap under the guise suck it and see, this i accept i took the risk and in some cases it worked and in others it really really didnt. However, alot of my music i have bought is because i am a fan, both a fan of music and a fan of the people who produce it (and the producers who produce the production of music). I bought cut the crap by the Clash, i bought The Great escape by blur, i bought ..well you get the idea. Quality control from majors and indies wasnt on my side during these tiems and opportunity to listen beforehand was limited, singles are not always a good precursor to albums - and dagnabit i bought them too.

but the times have changed oh my they have changed - and they changed while a lazy, drunken and self abused industry sat back and did nothing about it - then suddenly when they perceived they were getting spanked hard they reacted in a big song and dance about how ill-treated they were.
and thus i was going to continue until i read what Charlie Brooker had wrote and it was so concise and to the point i thought fuck it i'll copy and paste it:

“Apart from the occasional hardcore miser, the kind who’d shoplift at Oxfam, the vast majority of people who illegally download music from the internet do so because they bloody love music. They’re resorting to theft because they’re either too skint to afford 79p per track (often because they’re students), or because what they’re looking for is too obscure to find by commercial means, or because it’s been leaked and isn’t officially available and they’re just too damn excited to wait. In the main, these are dedicated fans: precisely the same audience who in days of yore would’ve filled C90 cassettes with songs taped off the radio. In its heyday, the Radio 1 Sunday evening Top 40 countdown constituted the biggest file-sharing portal in British history, with millions of users hooked up simultaneously, mercilessly downloading content to their tape decks.”


yeah that's pretty much it