Buying/Selling Music

My thoughts on buying and selling music……that is a hard question to answer. First of all, I am not a very rich person; I am a broke college student! All my spare cash goes to buying books and food while at school as well as supporting a social life off campus. After those expenses are handled, I am left with a very small balance in my banking account. Why on earth would I want to spend it on buying music that can be free??

I am a CD junky. I love to buy a new CD for several reasons. One is the artwork on the cover of the album and CD as well as the nifty book that comes with it containing the lyrics to the songs on the album as well as band info. It is cool to look through all the varying artists and see what avenue they take, even between different albums of the same artists. Another reason I like albums is because they are tangible. It is hard to lose a CD, but if your computer crashes….bye bye itunes. You can also discover new songs by listening to a whole CD as opposed to just buying the song that is most popular (the number one hit). However, often times there are only a few songs I like by an artist. I don’t feel like buying a whole CD for just one or two songs. Here is where free (though illegal) downloading comes into play. I do not have a dollar for every song I like/want on my ipod….I would be more broke than I am now! Sources such as limewire or frostwire allow me to access the same songs but for free.

After reading the two online articles, my free downloads are not quite so bad to me anymore. In comparison to the label company, the actual artist is hardly receiving any of the profits. When I buy a CD (or any merchandise for that matter) I want the artist to receive the profits. I am not paying the label company for the music, they did not create it!!! I do not go around looking at CD’s thinking “hmmmm I like this record company, I think I will buy this CD.” While downloading free of the internet gives no profit to the artist, I would rather have them get no profit than have negative profit because of all the bills they have to pay off in the production of the CD because the record company and their cronies took all the profits.