this is a great article written as a response to a girl who had said that she doesn't pay for music. she has thousands of songs, and she'd ripped them to her computer without ever paying. she justified it by saying she pays for tickets to see the bands live when they tour. i agree with the article. he very articulately details how the music industry is structured these days, how piracy and free downloading effects artists, and what the right thing is to do: you should pay for every song you download. that sounds great, but it seems a little ridiculous. when music was first made portable, it was fairly difficult to pass it from one person to the next. you went to watch a symphony or opera, or whatever, and then you left. you could only take the sound away in your head. then through various technological advancements, all made in an effort to spread art more easily (not sure how many artists protested this), music could now be listened to whenever you wanted. you could put on a record, and you had a copy of the art you had recently enjoyed. passing that along to your friends was difficult. they mostly had to come to your house or buy their own copy. then CDs - and sharing was easier than ever. "don't burn CDs. it's stealing!" so at that time, the right thing to do would have been to burn a copy, get a reasonable price from your friend, seal it in an envelope, and mail it to the record company. "no stealing here. just paying for everything we hear. thanks for making it available" obviously that's absurd, but now passing music has been made easier than ever before. you can just send a file - something that only exists in digital form, and no one ever sees the actual commodity moved from one hand to another. when you hear about bank robberies in the old west, it's always surprising it didn't happen more often. "no cameras? no bullet proof glass? how were they not robbed constantly?!" because there was probably a similar set of ethics compared to the ones we have today. if you could type "free money" into a search engine and then get directed to a site that actually let you grab money and put it into your bank account - people would constantly be doing that. there would be an ethical question of "whose money is this?" and then "who cares?" that's not exactly what people are doing with music because to stream music feels like you're taking something they wanted to share in the first place.