kampers.net

So, I was doing my show last Wednesday, and something weird happened.

Aside: my show on KSCR is called Netcast, and in my two-hour slot I play only music that you can legally download online for free. The point of the show is to pull people into the legal alternatives to Kazaa and the like (as opposed to push, which is what the RIAA does). The idea is to draw attention to the innovative artists out there who understand the power of the online music community.

Anyway. So I’m doing my show, and a bunch of girls walk in to the studio. Now, this is an unlikely event in the first place, akin to Lars buying shares of Napster, but that’s besides the point. The weird thing is that I was explaining the content of the show to one of the girls (“do you get to pick your own music? what kind of music do you play?”), and the conversation went something like this:

me: well, I play only music that you can download online, for free. girl #1: well, isn’t that almost everything these days?
me: no no, I only play songs that are legally available for free.
girl #1: what do you mean? what’s illegal?
girl #2: kazaa is illegal—
girl #3: it is?
girl #1: no way!

And it struck me that those RIAA goons have a point. I don’t personally know anyone for whom downloading has completely replaced legally purchasing music, but there must be a lot of them out there. Especially kids who were initially learning about music during or after Napster, which is everyone about four years or more younger than me.

I didn’t really have a moral problem with Napster et al. before, because I consider my use of it to be fair enough. I download songs before I buy them (would you buy a car without a test-drive?), and I download stuff that you can’t find elsewhere (bootlegs, b-sides, etc.). I used to download a lot of radio singles without bothering with the rest of the album, but I don’t really do that anymore… although this has more to do with my changing musical tastes than my downloading habits.

Anyway, it struck me that there are a lot of people (mostly younger than me) who legally own maybe five albums total, and have a collection full of burned CDs. That does seem wrong to me. A quick look at my music collection (which is stored on my hard drives in a lossless audio format) shows that it’s about 80% legal—that spans about 100 artists and about 300 albums. #