| The new
Super Furry Animals album continues to get itself talked about, at least
by a lot of critics, and I continue checking the local MegaMart for it,
where I don’t find it or the new Paul Westerberg, which irks me to
no end. A lot of people I know would just go ahead and download the whole
album, but everybody’s got a place where they’ve got to draw
the line, and that’s mine. My opinion is that if a person actually
wants to own an entire album, then they have something of an ethical responsibility
to either purchase it or go without it. I think downloading individual songs
-- millions of them if you have the time & bandwidth -- is a completely
different matter, for reasons that aren’t complex but are difficult
to phrase neatly; the bottom line is that while I can understand and sympathize
with the argument that downloading entire albums amounts to theft, the same
argument doesn’t hold true for songs, since the record industry went
out of its way to make EPs go the way of the dinosaur and therefore has
no complaint coming when people do what they have to do to get their hands
on the songs they want. Give me affordable EPs and I’ll buy them instead
of downloading songs. I have reason to suspect that there are many who feel
the same way I do about this, and that our desire for kick-ass EPs will
remain something that we have to address using the only tools we’ve
got, i.e., Audiogalaxy. |
