Wired posted an interesting article that music piracy is over. I suppose from my experience that would be true as well, but not because the lure has been removed. It’s more because the price has dropped so much. The days of carrying hard drives over to your friend’s house have long past for me. Of course that probably has more to do with my demographic than anything else. College students today may still be doing the same thing.
Ultimately we trade money for value, and in this case that value is expected to be music. For me the value lies elsewhere but music is still at the heart of it. I am self-proclaimed anal. I love keeping a neat desk, a neat room, well swept floors and all the other annoying habits that go with the title. Part of that is a neat file system. Like many other geeks, even the shabbier variety I think like to keep their computer files in some semblance of order. This leads me to the real value proposition for buying music which is the meta data.
Buying music means I don’t have to rip it, fix the track numbers, put it in its own directory under the right category and make sure all of my players pick up that location, not to mention backing the files up. Buying online gives me all of that easily. Plus it’s easy to find new music that you buy. Pirating requires trolling bit-torrent sites for files of dubious quality and mis-tagged data. There is also the old school method of assembling files from newsgroup posts, how arcane.
Buying music is simply the path of least resistance. Given the cost is so low now, the small contribution of which more goes to the artist, is well worth satisfying my anal nature when it comes to my file system.
