To Buy or Not To Buy

According to my textbook for Media Literacy class, close to 4 billion songs were downloaded illegally in a month and this was in 1999! (Potter 2011)  If you search the internet and newsstands alike you are likely to find stories about the great debate on music piracy.  The record labels and artists are right to want royalties for their songs--after all they are the people who put their lives into making the music we love to listen to--however, there are some merits to getting your music fix via the internet.  When listening to music on my computer I either use iTunes, Pandora, YouTube, or Spotify.  All these sites are legal (iTunes because you purchase the songs and the other sites all have advertising that they use to pay the artists for the rights to play the songs), but I often supplement my iTunes purchases with illegally downloaded songs through sites such as listentoyoutube.com.  

I once told my mom that I buy songs and albums for artists that I already know and love, while I download songs from artists I'm not as familiar with or songs I don't really like but want to have for whatever purposes.  Prior to the shutdown of Limewire in October 2010 (for more information click here) I was an avid user of the site.  You could easily search by artist, song, or album and click to download with the files easily added to your iTunes library.  By downloading songs on Limewire, I was introduced to new artists and even a completely new genre--country.  Today I am a huge country fan and will spend close to $200 this summer on tickets to see Lady Antebellum at a music festival and attend a 4-day country festival featuring Toby Keith, Blake Shelton, Luke Bryan, Jason Aldean and more. In the past year I bought 5 country albums in hard copies and purchased countless singles on iTunes.  If I hadn't explored the genre through my downloads from Limewire, I may have never discovered some of my current favorite bands that I now support with albums and concert ticket sales.  

I'm not saying that illegal downloading is a good thing, I just think that some good can come out of it especially for up-and-coming artists.  I've heard newer bands thank people for listening and downloading via whatever medium because that generates buzz and bands need buzz to break out.  So is downloading good or bad?  In 2007, a columnist at The Seattle Times said that Limewire itself was legal, but people must use it correctly (Marshall 2007).  I think this is a question that cannot be answered right now--there are many negatives to downloading, but I believe that bands and labels can benefit from it as well--and the great debate of to buy or not to buy will continue on.




Sources: 
Potter, James. Media Literacy. 5th. SAGE Publications, 2011. Print. 
Google images, 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/oct/27/limewire-shut-down, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/personaltechnology/2003533034_ptmrsh20.html