Andrew Speaks/Types

I had a conversation today with someone about Limewire and illegal music downloads, and I don’t think he got my point. Edmonds (the guy I was talking to) said that all the music on his mp3 player was downloaded illegally. I have probably about a hundred or so single songs that I’ve downloaded from sites like dogpile.com and sonicx.com, but the thing is, for songs like that, I either am in two situations.

1: I’m downloading a single from an artist I’ve never heard before so I can see if I would enjoy their album, or

2: I only like one song by an artist and I don’t want to pay the price of 9.99 for just that song. And don’t even get me started on iTunes. 99 cents for about 2-4 minutes of music is ridiculous. And iTunes won’t even let you download songs that are any longer than that without buying the album, that’s greedy too.

But back to the point, yes, I will download single songs from time to time. There are plenty of songs I have on my iPod that have been downloaded illegally, like “The Answers” by Lemon Sun. Great song, but I don’t think I like their style of music enough to buy 9 dollars worth of their music. Money’s tight, you know?

But there’’s always those band, you know? Those bands who you love everything they put out and you just WANT to support them and pay for their albums so you can have the full experience of listening to their music. Your favorite bands.  The bands that no matter how expensive CDs became, you’d still buy their stuff. Good examples of bands like this to me are:

The Mars Volta
Queens Of The Stone Age
Green Day
Incubus
Motion City Soundtrack
Gorillaz
The White Stripes
Wolfmother
Arctic Monkeys

And many more. But bands like that to me make CDs that I have to have the full package to fully enjoy. (Well, with the exception of Gorillaz, because I buy their albums digitally. A digital band goes hand in hand with digital albums.) I want bands like this to continue making music and to succeed, so I buy their stuff. Bands you really love you shouldn’t pirate.