I often end up in arguments with my peers concerning
pirating music. It usually gets pretty heated, and I get ganged up on
frequently.
Unlike most people my age I don’t pirate music. I pay full
price for each song and have amassed a music collection worth thousands of
dollars. Most of my friends think I’m crazy. They figure that if an artist is
popular enough to be on ITunes, they are wealthy enough to not care about the
additional ten cents per song otherwise.
That’s not the point, guys.
I’ve been where these artists are now. I know it may be hard
to believe, but I was once in a band. Girlfriends for groupies and parents for
roadies, typical high school stuff, but it was still just as much work as
anything even mildly more professional.
We didn’t suck, either. Amity Regional High school has an
award winning music and performing arts department, and the year we played POPS
(the annual audition-and-play-music-in-the-auditorium-for-money event) we
performed the only original song. I am proud to inform you that I wrote the
chorus music for that song, and figured out how to get my buddy Adam Watts his
dope drum solo.
I tell you this because I received absolutely no credit for
that song whatsoever. I worked hard to figure out the missing piece to that
song, and after a few weeks one of the other guys in the band started taking
all of the credit. The other band members, save Watts, started playing along
just to piss me off.
The punch line is that I spent some serious effort on intellectual
property and reaped no reward. There wasn’t any money involved, either. If I’m
so frustrated about simple bragging rights, I can only imagine how angering and
unfair it is to pour years of your life into an album only to have a bunch of
entitled college kids rip it off your CD and spread it on the internet. It is
absolutely the same thing as stealing. The music is the product these musicians
are selling, just because you can’t hold it in your hand doesn’t mean its ok to
unlawfully take it.
Just for giggles I attached a link to the recording of the
song. This was recorded by the band after Watts and I quit. I’ll warn you that
it’s pretty lame. Watts and I took all the bite with us when we left.
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