Sure, I owned some actual CDs but those were from my pre-Internet2-connection days at Tech. Looking back, I didn’t think anybody saw downloading music as “illegal”. The excuses for downloading music instead of buying it – “I don’t want all the whole album, just one track”, “$16 CDs are way overpriced and I’m not going to pay that much” – were more like explanations since there wasn’t anything wrong with it. Certainly it wasn’t like pirating software – that was bad and even though everyone did it, pirating a $600 copy of Photoshop just felt different than downloading a song.

So what changed? I discovered the value of Intellectual Property and I realized why copyright law was kind of a big deal… thanks to photography.

Before 2003 I was a photo hobbyist. I took pictures for fun, for myself and for the GT newspaper and yearbook. Towards the end of 2003 I crossed the line between hobbyist and semi-professional photographer. That is to say, I started getting paid and making real money from my pictures. In 2004 and 2005 more than half of my (admittedly meager) income was derived from picture sales. When Georgia Tech went to the Final Four in spring 2004 I was there, and I made several thousand dollars from pictures I made at that event.

I licensed a single picture from the Final Four for more than $1000 to be used on the cover of a commemorative DVD. Suddenly, the intangible protection of copyright had value to me. Lots of value.

Now, in 2006, I don’t do nearly as much photography and I have a “real” job that pays the bills. But I still license my pictures from time to time and I now buy all my music too. iTunes solved the “I only want one track off the album” complaint rather perfectly. Want just 1/10th of the album? Fine, that’ll be $1. Not unreasonable at all. Of course, if you don’t have an iPod, you’re SOL. (More about DRM and formats next time)

In fact it’s so easy to buy music from iTunes that you can end up spending way more than you realize. Looking at my account information I was trying to figure out how much I’ve spent on music through iTunes. (They very intelligently don’t display a running total of your purchases, but instead only list 15 purchases at a time which doesn’t look frightening at all.) After pulling out the calculator and manually adding up 6 (six!) pages of iTunes purchases, I got the grand total of $489 since 6/04. How many songs did that get me? 617. Most of those purchases were albums instead of single songs – sometime I’ll lament the loss of The Album – and even if an album is 12 or 14 songs, it still costs $10. So, on iTunes I’ve paid about $0.80 per song. That’s .80 dollars, not .80 cents.

I enjoy paying for my music now. Yes, I ENJOY paying for my music. I value it more, listen to it more and only buy music that I actually like instead of doing the grab-bag thing.

So, that is why I pay for music. Stay tuned for Part 2 (DRM, digital ownership).

For a good independent music download
site, go check out Magnatune.

Magnatune is a record company with the motto “We are not evil” (sound familiar?). Basically, they have mostly new and independent artists and when you buy an album you pick how much you want to pay, starting at $5 and going up to $18. Half of all sales go directly to the artist. And you can download uncompressed, non-DRM’d WAV files if you want. Oh, and they encourage you to give the songs you bought to 3 other people. No, you won’t find Audioslave on their site, but they do have some good stuff (I bought albums by Utopia Banished and Nova Express). Rock on.