Paying for music

Thanks to Ryan for pointing me off to Glen McDonald’s eloquent essay to the record industry. He writes as a long time consumer of pop music who has paid for more albums than he can count, but who has finally given up and “stolen” some music. His reasons for doing so make moral sense to me, and I think his conclusion is powerful:

"...the fact that it was easier to steal this album online than to find it in our house, which is much more a function of the net than our house [is not your fault. But] if you insist on ignoring this reality, you share some responsibility for the way our culture warps. If you try to rely on deliberate obscurity, you will lose. If you bank on valueless repackaging, we will show you another sense of "valueless". If you copy-protect CDs knowing full well that law-abiding listeners want to play them on laptops and iPods and Linux boxes, you precipitate morally correct resentment and defiance. If, with the resources of an entire industry of full-time workers and decades of catalogs and data and precedent, you serve music listeners less well than listeners and their hacked-together tech kludges serve each other, then you are defeated by your own market forces, and by your own market."