Where do we start with this one? Is it really a bad thing? Everyone knows about torrents and where to get the stuff.. (Almost sounding like drugs) BI Norwegian School of Management did a study."Researchers examined the music downloading habits of more than 1,900 Internet users over the age of 15, and found that illegal music connoisseurs are significantly more likely to purchase music than the average, non-P2P-loving user."

In layman's terms, people who download music for free are more likely to buy music than others. On the other hand, record labels don't seem to agree. EMI's Bjørn Rogstad said that free downloads stimulates people to pay for downloads. Although this cannot be known for sure. What kind of person are you?

I've seen that the iStore has taken an initiative to make it more convenient for people to shop online as some people don't really enjoy buying a CD just for one song. This is market the iStore capitalized on. The serious question is, what will happen when CD's are phased out? I understand the whole torrent thing.. Although I believe if you respect the artist and his/her music, you would go out and buy their CD. If you give your personal perspective, probably 10% of the music out in the world appeals to you. The other 90% is an absolute waste of time. Can we fork out money to buy every CD that comes out just to get a taste of what music they make? I'm sure each genre of music has devoted fans. Thus there will always be support for artists. There's so many choices out there!

Once knowing which artists we support, we would be able to go to all their shows and buy their CDs. If we as individuals can decide on where we stand on the music front, piracy wouldn't really be an issue. Looking back at what Bjørn Rogstad said. Some people out there are different as they aren't being stimulated to buy CD's. Is this really killing the music industry?

Lets talk about Pirate Parties! Unbelievably a political party! These parties are basically pro freedom of rights with music (If you buy it, it's yours) and against digital rights management (sync's to a server every time you use the device). A prime example is Microsoft's "PlayForSure". All supported devices were rendered useless after they switched of their servers. Let me explain: If you have an iPod, when connecting it to your PC, it does an erase and sync. Therefore you cannot connect your friends iPod to your iTunes as it will erase all your current music and replace it with your friends. Now if your iTunes library is empty? Then you would basically just be clearing out all your music..... But the positive part of this is that you may have your library on your PC locally and not sitting on a server in the middle of nowhere. So you may re-add your music to your library and go on from there. With "PlayForSure" your music was bought, although you wouldn't download it. The music would be added to your account on the server. Messed up? I think so! If you had bought music for hundreds of rands, once they switch of the servers and stopped supporting the devices(closing the project), your device would try to sync but not find anything on the servers. You would lose everything you supposedly paid for!

Lets hope this is not the way of digital media for the future.. Imagine having a mp3 that you paid for although it would only work on your PC... Or downloading a mp3 with an expiration date... Digital rights management is a no no.

That was a tangent of note! For freeeeeeeee! You decide...