Now, there are people who are already asking why they’d want to buy music from the iTunes store when they can get it for free from Soulseek, or Kazaa, or Acquisition, or whatever. I have spent a good part of the last thirty-six hours trying to figure out how to explain to you why it’s more fun spending money on something you could get for free than it is to just, y’know, take it. Because Napster was fun: there’s no denying it. Who didn’t spend whole weekends parked in front of the computer typing obscure requests into Napster’s engine to see if somebody out in Nevada, say, might not have had a copy of the Vanity 6 live-in-Orlando tape recorded on the night when Vanity first started having misgivings about the image she’d agreed to project? (There is no such recording, by the way. I just made that up as a f’r-example.) But anybody who says that the experience of downloading a file for free is comparable to buying a new record you wanted doesn’t suffer the same affliction that we record-collector/hoarder types do. It pains my inner Marxist to say this, but it’s the truth, and most of you know what I mean, too: there’s something comforting about buying something you want.
