Why I Stopped Pirating Music
Monday, September 3, 2012 at 9:49AM
It's been ages since I downloaded something I shouldn't have via P2P or a torrent. Moral and ethical issues aside--which did prey on me--it became too just too much trouble. Now I buy everything, assured that I'll get complete, high-quality, virus-free files. What I don't buy, I stream through Rdio or Slacker.
I'm not alone, either. From Cult of Mac:
After nearly a decade, my iTunes library weighs in at almost ninety-four gigabytes. A lot of serious music nerds would sneeze derisively at that, but it still represents over 13,000 songs that would take me, from start to finish, a full 48 days to listen to back to back.
I’d be lying if I said most of these had been acquired legally. Most of these albums were acquired on Bittorrent in my twenties. Many more were ripped from CDs lent to me by friends and family, or slurped up from Usenet to satisfy my obscure yet surface-thin musical fixations. Some were purchased through iTunes or other sources online, but truthfully, if you stripped everything out of my iTunes library that I’d acquired legally, I’d probably have a digital music library that could fit on a first generation iPod.
Over the course of the last two years, though, something interesting has happened. I’ve grown a conscience. These days, all of the music I listen to is listened to legally. But iTunes not only has no part in it. In fact, for the past two years, my iTunes library has just been collecting dust: a graveyard to the music piracy of my youth.
I’m ashamed of it. I want to try to explain things. Both why I started pirating music, why I stopped, and how, in fits and starts, being a music pirate helped transform me into someone who cared enough about music to buy it.
Reader Comments (6)
nice article. i remember when i was kid i'd travel with my friends across the GTA to the Record Peddler downtown Toronto. Buying records was a mission. Flipping through the collection of vinyl imports. Deciding which albums we'd have to hide from our parents. Deciding which each of us would buy. But then we'd always tape our albums for each other. I guess back then it wasn't "pirating"?
For doug; "Home Taping Is Killing Music": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music (the general difference is quantity, quality and ease of use...)
A good story on how growing up (being more mature, seeing the larger picture) and having more access to funds has increased his appreciation of music.
Interesting, I, personally have found that I hardly ever hit up the torrent sites these days. In fact, I can't honestly remember the last time I did. I always had a handful of rules, if I'm already a fan of the band, not just a single, but the artist themselves, I didn't download their albums. If it was a new band I was getting a taste for I would download their album and if I liked it and could find it on vinyl or a special edition CD I would buy it. Non-released stuff, live concerts, demos, bootleg CDs are always fair game. And if I'm so into a band that I want their bootleg stuff, then when the lable "officially" releases this stuff as a box set or something, I'd be buying it anyways. I mainly used to to try out new bands and to find really obscure stuff you could find at Best Buy. More recently I've been more and more into independent artists and Atlantic Canadian artists, whose stuff usually doesn't turn up of the big torrent sites anyways. I think it's a part of the music eco-system and it seems like more and more people are choosing to get a bit more of their albums and singles through legall channels now.
I don't understand why you feel bad about using torrents, exactly. Isn't the refusal of the industry's product at least in part a reaction to history of it's own excessive greed, shoddy products and bloated infrastructure? After all, the music industry didn't create music, it just found away to produce it in mass quantities.
You don't really explain by what you mean by "growing a conscience," either. Am I to support companies who release shitty products and never adapted to change, and what's more, pay like 1000 times what the product would cost to manufacture? I'm a record collector and music lover, but that doesn't mean I'll eat up any product they throw my way.
Rdio has supplanted torrenting for me. I always wanted to be legit, but I also didn't want to throw away money on albums I'd listen to once, or risk money exploring an artist or genre that I might turn out not to like (although that is arguably money well spent, exploring new horizons and taking risks)
So now, for $10 a month, I can research, explore, and screen all my purchasing decisions via Rdio, and proceed to obtain them legally for my permanent collection at my leisure and at a financially sound pace. It's made me a better consumer, a more critical listener, and more appreciative of the music I'm collection.
I'm not read to give up my iTunes library for Rdio or some other streaming solution wholesale, but for the price, it's an unbeatable tool. If it saves me one bad purchase a month, it's paid for itself, and how hard is that these days?
As someone in the creative industry it would be the height of hipocracy to Torrent music, while lambasting others for stealing my work. Fortunately, between iTunes, Spotify and my monthly subscription to eMusic, I can pretty much listen to what I want when i want it. if it's the case of something exceedingly rare, there's always ebay, and for fan-club releases, I can just join the fanclub.