I’ve recently become aware of the music-sharing/music-downloading programs mediafire and megaupload, which has done a lot for my intake of new music — which, as I have written before, has been a bit absent and missed in my life as of late. I’m pretty questionable on the ethics of these programs — though not that questionable on their awesomeness — but there are two ways in which straight-up downloading music differs from actual physical/store theft. 1.  There is less enforcement and 2. more people do it so therefore the chances of getting in trouble for it are significantly lower. 

Obviously, this doesn’t make the moral case for doing it any stronger, but it does make it a bunch easier to stretch you own morals if the desire is there. So the thought-process that goes, “I don’t have much extra money and these artists won’t starve without my dollars and this music makes me happy and this is probably what the artists care about more than anything and I want to live life to fullest and will hopefully come to a point in my life where I will support the arts and other things I care about but that point isn’t now and oh by the way I’m vegetarian and a caring person…” is a lot easier to entertain. And I’m willing to settle with/acknowledge the fact that my principles cannot be completely detached from my emotions. 

I know that this justification process doesn’t totally win out, because I think I still will occasionally buy albums on iTunes if I like the artist enough and want to directly support him/her/them. Also, increased cracking-down would definitely scare away a lot of half-hearted downloaders like myself. But increased cracking-down would somewhat insinuate that this type of activity really bothers artists and their corporate backers — and the absence of that suggests otherwise. (For the record, I couldn’t find anything about crack-downs on mediafire or megaupload, or, likewise, anything about their actual legal status. I searched around on Google and it was hard to find anything that was definite. It’s hard to imagine that they are legitimately legal but it seems like pretty widespread activity — just start typing any recent artist and cd name and usually the second generated query will end with “mediafire”). 

Anyways, if you want a great winter-y minimalist electronica album from a great Stockholm-based musician, go here. It may take a few minutes to download, and if you have trouble unzipping it (either it will be a .zip or a .rar file) just drag it over StuffIt Expander (which comes with all Macs) and it should open in your downloads folder — or wherever you left it — where it will be ready to be dragged into your iTunes. 

UPDATE: I just remembered reading a profile on Lewis Hyde who wrote a book about the art’s relation to the market economy called the Gift. And yes, I just found it on Amazon. I’m planning on reading it this week, because I have been thinking about this a bit these past few weeks. I’ve actually been working on a longer-ish long post on Sufjan Stevens and hopefully this book, and the ability to listen to Steven’s new album all the way through will help me finish that. 

(You can click on this post to permalink it, and you can comment on it from there… if anyone would like to discuss this… which I would be really happy to do so).