I don’t necessarily write a lot about it, but I’m a music nut. I guess it’s fashionable to say you like all styles of music, but I honestly can’t say there’s any style I don’t like. (That being said, there is certainly music within each genre that I either like or dislike… but anyways…)
Obtaining music online is pretty easy, and there are a lot of different ways to do it.
There’s the free as in beer method which simply involves getting a P2P program and copying tunes from your several million “close friends” who are also on the same P2P network. However, it seems that this is called “stealing,” something I like to think I’m not going to do or endorse, so I’ve opted not to go that route.
Then there’s the iTunes store, and related models, which sell songs at around $0.99, and whole albums for a small discount versus buying all the songs. Financially, it’s roughly equivalent to just buying the album, except that the songs generally come laden with DRM (Digital Rights Management, or, built-in restrictions on how you can copy the file and which devices will play it) — which winds up treating you like a criminal if you try to put the song that you paid for on more than 5 computers. Maybe I’m just too much of a computer nerd, but I change computers and rebuild them so often that this model basically means that my iTunes songs become worthless to me as I’m eventually no longer authorized to play them on my own computers. (I know, there is a way to “de-authorize” computers, thus freeing up a “slot” — still the whole thing bugs me.)
Then there’s our new friends: capitalist Russia.
As the blurb on the Squidoo List of Russian MP3 sites says, “Their legality is a matter of constant debate.” For myself, I haven’t looked into it (said legality) too much — it seems to me that if I visited Russia I could buy things and bring them home. And I am paying for the music.
And they only want (depending on the site) 12 to 19 cents per song, less if you’re buying the whole album. So, I guess I could be accused of wanting to believe that purchasing music at said sites is legal. Basically, I think that if there really is a legal problem, it is the sites who are going to be liable, and will be shut down. The consumer, on the other hand, is operating on good faith that the site is authorized to provide the, um, incredibly cheap DRM-free songs and albums that it sells…
Okay, enough moral waffling. Do some research, make up your own mind.
