Wax

My friends and I have eclectic tastes in music. We listen to every thing from blues roots through to gangsta rap. Someone might discover a new artist and will share it with the group or perhaps just give a copy of an old favourite. Collectively my friends would buy maybe 5 – 10 CDs per week. We talk about them, review them and share them. Of course the last activity is illegal. All this activity keeps you buying music well into an age where you are supposed to be buying gardening magazines and you first sports car.

I don’t know if I am alone on this but when I am buying CDs if I see the copy protected symbol I tend to put the CD back. I am not a rampant pirate, I don’t upload to P-P services but I do buy a lot of CDs. I hate it when I get home and find I have not checked and have a copy protected CD. It stops me enjoying the music that way I want to.

I love music (well, the music that I like anyway). I like to buy the physical media and the utility of an unencumbered disk. I listen to CDs in my car, while I am walking about on my MP3 player, on my computer at work and even sometimes on my home HiFi system. I don’t want to carry a stack of disks everywhere I go. I want to rip/burn and play.

Some times I will make a copy (shock horror, and illegal in this Country) for a friend. Sometimes one of my friends will give me a copy of one of their CDs. I have even experimented downloading music. The thing is I still buy music at the rate of about 1 CD a week (sometimes more but that is release driven). If I didn’t get the freebies I wouldn’t buy any more and over time more likely less.

Here is an example of the way it works. I got a copy of a Spearhead CD about three or four years ago from a friend. I liked it a lot. Since then I have bought all their albums (including the one I got a copy of), all album releases by Michael Franti (the main man) and one release from his previous group - The Disposable Heroes of Hiphopracy. I also went to his concert when he played a local gig. The same is True for Faithless and a number of others.


Now you might say I could have been equally informed by listening to the radio or watching music Vids on TV but this is not true. Most stations play formula based, fairly un-original music pushed by the recording companies. They never play full albums and are repetitive with little room for original music. Worst of all they are packed with adverts and mindless drivel. So without finding new music that I like why would I buy new music?

I don’t want to buy MP3s or equivalent from iTunes etc. They are low quality and lack the utility I want when I buy music. I also strongly resent copy protection because it a) implies I am a criminal and b)is trivially easy to circumvent so the real criminals have no problem producing and selling copies. I just can’t see the point of it.

So no copy protection for me! (actually it should be called preventing the ill-informed from copying protection).

Music is free. Recording companies just figured out a way to make profit from it.