Homo Viator

Those of you who know me better know how much money I have pumped into i-Tunes and have often asked me why I pay for songs, when I could download them for free. Of course I have not paid for all my 30.000 songs and have also downloaded songs from file sharing sites, but I prefer i-Tunes for several reasons.

First of all: I love the product. i-Tunes is wicked and their beta recommendation system on the spot. Based on your past purchases, they recommend you songs or artists that, according to their data profiling, would suit your taste. The more you buy, the better their profiling gets. Like this, I have stumbled upon many great artists, who I would have maybe never discovered otherwise.
Secondly, I like to buy complete albums and also like to see the artist's cover choice, even if it is just in digital form. I also love i-Tunes Essentials. The Bob Dylan Essentials that I bought for 200EUR includes all his 783 recorded songs and was probably the best thing I have ever bought in my life. It gives me instant gratification and pleasure, at least five times a week when I return to good old Bobby D for some musical stimulus.

Thirdly, I own Apple stocks and you gotta support what you invest in. The money that Apple has made me justifies me buying many more i-Tunes essentials.

Fourthly: I do want to support young and struggling artists. When I wanted the Paolo Nutini CD for example, I really asked myself what consequences it would have if most people just stole his music. This 19 year old songwriter deserves complete success, so that in the future record labels will hopefully sign up more acoustic songwriters and not just overlaid, non-writing starlits.

Lastly, I wonder whether I should include the fear of legal prosecution as one of the reasons that motivates me to buy my music on i-Tunes. Believe it or not, but my friend Luca got busted for downloading music. Even though he never re-distributed the music, he got fined a couple of thousand Euros. The illegal thing about mp3 downloading is not the downloading itself. The illegal thing is that sites such as Limewire put your downloaded songs in shared folders, where you share them with other Limewire users, who then effectively download those songs from you. The uploading and sharing of songs is the illegal part. You can of course disable that function, but most people don't.

There is a new, rather secretive site that gets rid of the uploading/sharing part. Here you just type in the song or artist that you are interested in and it refers you to websites where you can just download the songs, without having to use any file sharing service. You simply right click on the song and save it under whatever folder you want. It is legal for you, free and very fast.