Sigh. If every music pirate spent hundreds annually on concerts and impulse-bought mp3s, maybe pirating wouldn't be a problem. I don't know a single person like Barry though. Let me tell you about real people I know, not made up ones. The names are changed to protect the innocent.

First, you have Sal. Sal has an iPod loaded with a couple thousands songs that he got from a friend. None of them were obtained legally. As far as I can tell, Sal doesn't listen to music any other way. Period. He listens to the iPod on shuffle 24/7 and spends not a penny on the artists which are on the iPod.

Next is Matt. Matt is a huge music fan and spends hours finding cool new music. But as far as I can tell, Matt has never spent a penny on music in his life. Matt will download an artist's entire collection and listen to it for years without ever dreaming of buying something from them. Besides, most of the bands Matt listens to don't tour widely enough to come to town. Surely if you're listening to indie artists from Portland and you live in D.C., you aren't supporting them by going to concerts.

The story of Barry, the good pirate who downloads music just to find what he likes so he can pay money for it, is just that, a story. It sounds nice, but it isn't what I've seen in the majority of music pirates.

Besides which, if your intent is just to discover new artists, you can do that legally in numerous ways. There are online radios like Pandora and Jango which let you hear lots of music. There are free previews on every music store I know of. There are official YouTube stations from the artists or record labels. There are artist websites, which almost always have an embedded player playing their music. There is MySpace, which most artists are on, even though MySpace sucks in general. There are sites like CDBaby which offer substantially longer previews (sometimes up to 2 minutes) and have indie artists and pay the artists better. There is Magnatune, which lets you listen to entire albums as a preview.

Also, the argument about not going to stores is crap. A cover and blurb? Is there a music store in the world that doesn't let you preview CDs in some way or another?

In fact, the whole "but copyright will prevail" paragraph is crap. No one is trying to stop impulse buying of mp3s. Buying of mp3s is what record labels want. No one is trying to stop anyone from reading about artists online. And unrelated to my main point, has the author ever heard of film trailers?

The author creates a false dichotomy in artists as well: favorite artists and artists whose music is crap. What about artists that you listen to every once in a while but aren't favorites? Should you support them or is it OK to pirate their music? I'll grant you that if you listen to an album only once, you aren't committing a huge sin in not paying for it, but what if you listen to it 5 times? 10? 20? When do you have to pay for it?

This is getting very disjointed, but there are also plenty of sites (or there used to be at least) where you can pay for an unlimited amount of listening, but pirates still won't use them. If they're honestly just trying to discover cool new music, why not pay a small fee for that right? You could also use satellite radio for the same purpose. Numerous business models for music have been tried, and piracy hasn't been affected at all. CDs have been reduced in price almost 50% from 10 years ago, and piracy hasn't been affected. Doesn't this suggest piracy isn't just about a bad business model?

As far as I can tell, piracy is about this: people see no reason to pay for something when they can get away with not paying for it. This is the actual real-life use of piracy that I have seen hundreds of times. This is what people were doing when I was in school and they would spend hours on school computers on P2P networks. This is what Sal and Matt are doing.