Do you download pirated music?

No pirating for me since I'm making my own money. I just buy the music when I see it on discount / buy it used on eBay. If it's something I really want to have I don't mind to pay retail price for a CD or vinyl.

As I sometimes have rather niche tastes in music I often can't find what I'm looking for anyway, so I just rely on my trusted sellers.

Also pirated music
a) is often of bad quality (there's no way I want 128kbps MP3s)
b) gets you admonished really quickly in Germany (starts at appr. 250 EUR if you instantly pay. Best is to not pay at all)

Why should I buy MP3s on iTunes? A CD is 12-16 EUR, each song on iTunes is 1 EUR if I buy it alone, the CD around 10 EUR when I buy it completely. And then the quality of the MP3s is subpar to the CD.

I can rip a CD to MP3 that fit what I want and then put the CD in my closet. I'm absolutely willing to spend a little more to have a real physical copy of my music. With artwork and all that crap.

Oh, and of course most people will have experienced that case when you buy a CD because of 2 songs and after a month you found out that there are songs on it that are far better but you would have never known if you didn't buy they CD.

+1. But I think I am the last guy among my friends still buying actual CDs. The rest are just downloading music for free (or borrowing my CDs and ripping them).

FLAC

Aye, that is even better. But as iPod is the MP3-player of choice for many people they won't be using flac compression (I don't think many of them are aware that they could put Rockbox on their iPod and have a far better player). Out of curiosity, is there a legal online music seller that offers flac?

As long as there are people who think 15 EUR will buy them really good earphones, there will be people who think a (pirated) 128kbps MP3 is state-of-the-art.

I pirate when it's convenient. Music that is well known and popular is easy to find but you are sol if you want good bitrates most of the time. Generally I play my music through my ipod and generic ear buds so it's pointless to worry about high bitrates when the hardware is crappy. Sometimes I want stuff that is very rare so even trying to find it online to pirate is a chore in itself. I don't use piratebay much though. If I need something specific I ask friends at another forum or load up soulseek. Otherwise I buy from bleep and beatport. Oh I also don't really have any guilt about it. I guess being around when napster was huge desensitized me to the whole process. Napster was kinda lol though, most people using it only wanted to download hit songs you heard on mtv or radio anyways so it kind of made music exploration pointless.

No.

I buy a lot of CDs second hand for a dollar or two or three.

This allows me to try things that I would never be able to explore much at a dollar a track.

Yesterday, I bought an CD of "Sundanese Instrumentalia' which sounds like a gynecological term but isn't. The music is very beautiful.

If course this is no good for currrent popular music, but for anything issued or reissued during the 25 year heyday of CDs, it's pretty good.

I like to buy records so it's a non issue. My ideal situation is having a record of the album and mp3s of it, something indie labels are beginning to package together at no additional cost which is really nice.

That being said now that iTunes dropped DRM, I've been buying stuff from them. iTunes has a surprisingly large library of difficult to find ambient and drone.

I really get annoyed when people find out I just bought a CD and they want to borrow it to copy it...

For those interested: The CD I bought was produced for domestic consumption; I couldn't even tell what country it was from. The cover art did not tell much. Turns out Sundan is an area of Java. The handwritten original sticker price was in Rp, perhaps Indonesian rupees (?). The US reissue, with same cover art, is here: Very peaceful music.

My answer in a story....

A couple of years ago I stumble across an mp3 from a band from CA I never heard before. I loved the song but couldn't find much about them. I continued to listen and search for them, a year later they released a full length on an indie label.

The album wasn't available on iTunes or stores around here. I download the entire album, I listened to it religiously, I made bootlegs to give to friends to tell them how awesome it was.

A few months later, they are finally in town for their first East coast show. It was a tiny dive bar with a tiny turnout. I can say easily half of the crowd were friends I turned on to the band. I stood in front the whole time and saw them getting a kick out of me, singing along to all the songs.

After the show my friends and I go to the merch booth to talk to the band, say thanks for playing, etc..... and the guitar player said he saw me singing along and really appreciated the support in a new city, and asks how I've heard of them. I told him about the 1 mp3, not being able to find the album, downloading it, etc....

He immediately (and loudly) started giving me shit about downloading the album and how it hurts them.... I pointed out that if I wouldn't have downloaded that album:

*It wasn't available anywhere else around here

*I wouldn't be at the show singing along and making them feel welcome

*I wouldn't have been able to turn on others to the band

*The people who I turned onto the band wouldn't have been 5 feet from us during our argument, buying tshirts and hoodies from their merch booth.

*They would have lost most of the ticket sales from that night and would have played to a near empty room.

I said thanks again for playing, also mentioned that I was planning on offering them a place to stay that night but he ruined that by being a dick, wished him good luck and left. As I was leaving I saw the singer of the band yelling at the guitar player for being a douche. I haven't really listened to them since.

If you're not DLing pirated music, then you're closing yourself off to a whole world of sounds. Who knows when it's ever going to be this easy? They might just take it away from us.