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http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/

has caused me to start paying for albums a lot more regularly. Hell, I paid for my first downloaded LP due to this place.

Also her point is clearly not to wear a badge of pride about not paying for albums, but is instead to illustrate that she is of an age group / generation who were never limited to buying albums in physical form, having come of consciousness with the internet already in existence. She doesn't miss liner notes etc the way older people do because they were never the norm for her. Because of her age.

Cue a stupid thread about how people who don't pay commercial prices for albums are basically Hitler from people whose understanding of shared culture comes straight from the conservative property rights playbook.

you are basically directly responsible for the deaths of Mark Linkous and Vic Chestnutt, according to this response.

seems to justify not paying for albums. Just that she and her friends are too cheap to do so? Big fucking news.

I mean, it's not hurting anyone. Her loss that she doesn't get the sound quality / artwork / liner notes but she's paying the money to download MP3's off iTunes.

But then she was bangin' on about how she'll never pay for it and it'd be great if there was a big magic spotify type thing that meant she could listen for free but artists would still get paid (WUT?)

So to sum up...

At first I was like this: "Aye, fair enough." But then I was like this: "What? Naw, fuck off! Do one ya boot!"

I honestly don't think i've bought five records in the last five years.

Might do in the future. Not completely against it, but i just think they're far too expensive.

I do have a £5p/m subscription to Spotify, though, so i sleep well in my bed knowing that i contribute something towards the hard work of the many, many artists that i love dearly.

is already enormously depressing.

If you're going to intern at a radio station, and probably not get paid, you're probably doing it to get access to some free music, and maybe some free tickets, and yuhknow, maybe to meet some of the musicians you love.

Just because she treats CDs like digital carcasses, doesn't mean she doesn't care about music or values it (if she values her time spent working at a radio station for free, being deluged in links to listen to things, and perhaps given time to 'work' listening to promotional material). I think this under-scores an important but often neglected point that most people within the business of music acquire a helluva lot of music for free, and they are the ones who then have to place a value upon it. If you ask a lot of people in the bizniz how much a ticket for a festival costs or how much a new release is nowadays, some of them will have a shot in the dark, but I bet there are very few who don't work directly with the finances, who can tell you what things actually cost, and even fewer seem to be able to breakdown have the finances actually work. And these are the people trying to establish a 'value' to music, when they spend half their lifes in cordoned off backstage areas and putting in requests for promotional records...and maybe every once in a while going to a secondhand vinyl store to buy a record, where none of the revenue goes back into the record business...

These are very broad brushstrokes and within the silhouette of the business of music there are real exceptions to this rule, but on the whole, there are a lot of people who are ignorant (either out of choice or by design by those around them) to the 'value' of music. I mean, I still end up explaining to PRs that when they bike me a CDR that the artist is paying for it, and that if it's a band I really love or one that I know is in precarious 'could be dropped before the record comes out', that I'll happily wait a day or two for the royal mail or better still swing by next time I'm in the neighbourhood and pick it up. Basically, the excesses in the music industry (at least at major labels) are far smaller than the wastes (like the decades the record business invested in the live industry, as it continued to get richer and richer, relying on labels to buy tickets to giveaway to promote gigs and to invest in building an artists live career, when the promoters put in very little to cover the shortfall...), but that's a whole other topic...

All I'm saying is that it feels like maybe this intern (and the 1000s of others working unpaid in the music biz today) is just someone who wants more music than they can afford, and is happy to exchange their time for it, rather than their money.

At some point the editor of this site should've probably warned their intern that writing this would be a Very Bad Idea. But no - page views galore.

Take a far stupider, reductive approach to how I acquire music (I buy it, because that is what I've always done). Still, 100% agreed with the David guy that 'convenience' is an absolute bullshit argument- it's about ten times EASIER to get something via iTunes or Amazon's mp3 market than it is to Google it and sift through shitty torrents.

I spent a large proportion of what little money I had on music. Too large. Some of it was great, and I still listen to it now, but at least half of it was average. I'd spend £6 for an album that I knew had two songs I liked, to find the rest of it was garbage.

I think I was taken advantage of. I was sucked into a massive marketing spin that overpriced the product, and took advantage of my youthful enthusiasm for new music.

The current situation is much fairer. Kids can browser freely, and make more informed choices about the artists they want to follow more closely. They then go and see thos artists live, and might - just might - download some of their music from a paid source.

Shitty bands, and shitty record companies have few opportunities to rip kids off. This is a good thing.

And I don't see music suffering. There is a much greater range of good quality music around right now, made by people who are in it for the right reasons. Some of them will become successful and make a reasonable career in the music industry, and others will have fun trying.

I can't see the problem. We are in a better place now.

Indie artists struggle to get by.

Wasn't the situation the same as in the CD boom of the 90s? Except music trends have changed, guitar bands aren't mainstream any more. You could ubstitute someone like The Smashing Pumpkins for Skrillex - he made $15m before even releasing a single.

Stealing ain't cool, but the world keeps spinning.

My problem with this girl's outlook is that she is unable to value the music she's obtained. She has no personal investment in it, so she has no desire to enjoy it. She just rips it at random, without cause for research or proper thought.

Even as someone who receives a fair share of promos which I take full advantage of, I always like to 'own' something, whether on CD or on mp3 - I've got into the habit of going to a record store once a month to pick up my (imported) copy of Wire and I always make a point of picking out a CD to buy at the same time. Then I go home, scan through my copy and highlight stuff I'd like to get next time/download from Boomkat. The reason I like this is that the physical act of purchasing something makes you more invested in the product - you want to listen to it. I've lost track of the number of unlistened mixtapes, promos and all the other crap I've clogged up my hard drive with which usually sit there for months on end unlistened until I decide to sample a track and decide it doesn't really excite me.

I remember reading somewhere that if we want to move to a true digital culture we need to start treating our mp3s in just the same way as records: we need to throw them away if we decide they're worthless, we need to resell them, we need to share them and above all we need to value them. Purchasing something provides it with a value to you - you have expended time and money, rather than just mb/s, to get hold of it. Therefore, you'll want to listen to it, and you'll want to decide whether it's good or not. But what follows is that, if it's rubbish, like a CD or a vinyl, we have to dispose of it. We need a second hand mp3 market.