This is a very long thread about a topic that seems to keep coming up in different places. At the risk of saying something that's already been said, but with the possibility that it's from a different perspective, here are some extracts of a discussion I posted elsewhere a year ago about this sort of thing.

Now, just to let you all know, I'm probably a lot different from you. I'm 25 years old. I'm American. I started downloading music 10 years ago. At that time, I was downloading things like Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead. And heavy metal. The sort of thing you're into at 15. I found some private servers, and was able to listen to people I'd heard of but never been able to listen to. By the time I was 18 I discovered bands like the Incredible String Band. I was leaving heavy metal and headed firmly in the direction of folk. In the college years I was exposed to lots of different sorts of music though friends who would share their collections with me. Jazz, blues, indie, avantgarde. I would browse record stores from time to time and when I had cash (which was rare, being an art student), I would buy something in the field I'd recently discovered. I became obsessed with John Fahey, delved into his roots, and turned on a lot of classmates to his stuff. Thanks to illegal downloading sites I got to hear all the great old dead raw blues guys - guys like Son House and Bukka White and M. John Hurt and Skip James. They inspired me to pick up the guitar and start learning it.

I wanted to hear more stuff from Britain & Ireland, but I just couldn't find any. Eventually I found The Folk Box (Topic or something? 4 discs) on a torrent or private server or something. It was like a whole new world opening. I'd never heard of people like Nic Jones or Richard Thompson before coming across THTM. And I'd never heard of THTM before trying to find info on some of the artists featured on The Folk Box. I'd never heard of any of the artists there because in a lot of cases their music wasn't released in the States, or if it was it happened before I was born. In fact, The only folk music from across the pond I'd heard was the Clancy Brothers, and that off some greatest hits CD for which they probably received very little (RIP Liam). And after my curiosity was piqued by THTM and other sites, I looked around in the local record shop, and all I could find from across the pond was British Invasion stuff. Thanks to online music sharing, my interest had expanded beyond what the record shop could provide. Eventually, I found music sharing communities and started my own blog as a way of piquing the interest of others and expanding their musical horizons, and sharing music that I treasured with others who may not have access to it. And in return I have been given exposure to (and illegally downloaded music from all corners of the world: obscure Indian Classical vocalists and veena-ists, Alan Lomax collections, flamenco, field recordings from Africa, gamelan music, Irish music, Chinese classical music, prophetic street-composers from New York, Brazillian guitarists, American old-timers, and yes, British folk music too.). And people all over the world have been able to hear music from my corner, which they would not have heard of otherwise. I may not have bought any Indian Classical cds and my friends in India may not have bought any bluegrass & blues. But our tastes are expanding, and we continue to support the music around us and buy cds, and if we get the opportunity to see a musician from a genre we've been turned onto, we'll probably go. Now, have any of these musicians lost anything as a result of my practices?

Clearly not. But, you will ask, have any of them gained? Well, yes. I couldn't say that all of them have, but hell, half the music I get is from artists whose work has outlived them, may they rest in peace. But right now I'm living in Ireland. Recently Mozaik (world fusion band with Andy Irvine, Donal Lunny, Bruce Molsky, eastern european & dutch multi-instrumentalists) did a tour in Ireland. I'd heard of them because I'd pirated both their albums, and was really excited by them. So excited, in fact, that I told everyone I knew in the area about the gig, (none of whom had heard of the band, even though it's their generation) got them to come, paid something like 60 euros getting tickets for people, and the people who I brought bought albums. Did I ever pay for the albums I downloaded? Nope. Did I end up giving more money to the band than whatever royalties those albums would have brought? Hell yeah. I should add that I was one of the only people in the audience under 30, and possibly the only one who had ever heard the gadulka before (thank you music sharing community). As has been said before, the means of music distribution is changing. As is the means of information distributing. Maybe if there were more people blogging Mozaik, they'd be drawing a younger audience and maybe even playing stadium shows instead of, say, Coldplay. They certainly have the talent.

I remember a story about how in 1969, Rolling Stone magazine offered to send a copy of Mississippi Fred McDowell's album I Do Not Play No Rock and Roll for free to anyone who wrote to them and asked. And this single act probably caused more rock and roll fans to discover the blues (and subsequently purchase more blues albums, attend concerts, etc.) than any other act of marketing. [i may have some of the details wrong on this account, but you get the point]

Personally, I have become a much more conscious and avid consumer of music thanks to "music piracy". You see, because of music sharing, my interest in and exposure to music has grown 100-fold. If I had to pay $15 every time I saw something interesting and wanted to give it a listen, my musical horizons would have stayed pretty limited. By indulging and supporting my curiosity, the pirates of the inter-seas have made of me a musical connisseur, where once there was just passing interest. Forums and 'sharity' blogs have particularly helped to rouse my interest in unknown artists and forgotten genres. And, since the big-names are readily available for piracy, the obvious choice is to support the lesser-known and local artists, or those who have really given their lives to their music.

In fact, I feel that by distributing the music of Son House and Blind Willie Johnson, I may be helping to open up a whole new world of experience for someone who is used to more polished music, and they may begin to appreciate the raw emotions of flamenco music or Greek rebetica. By posting Harry Partch and Tom Cora, I may turn a few people on to a world of improvisational and microtonal avantgarde music. Growth comes through exposure and experience. You can never know how these things will change someone. They've certainly changed my life. Incidentally, I've received letters from record companies thanking me for the article I wrote (which included a download), and asking me if they could quote it in a booklet for the artist's upcoming release. I've also received numerous requests from musicians to post their material on my blog because they wanted the exposure. And I know more than one band who went from total obscurity to international tours as a result of internet distribution and sharing, some of it legal, most of it not.

Another story, more recent. Radiohead, one of the most intelligent contemporary 'rock' bands, released their most recent album for download from their website before it was released in physical form. Radiohead allowed users to pay however much they liked, including nothing. They made £10 Million or so, on an average of £7.00 or so per user. And none of that money got taken by a middle-man in the form of a retail store or a record company. Now, Radiohead is a big-name band with millions of fans. But the principle works the same for small-name artists. And it shows that people who download can be generous, especially if the artist is generous first.

You see, Radiohead realized that even if you issue an album conventionally, even with copy-protection embedded in the CD, it still gets posted on the internet within a week of release. So why not embrace the new system of music-distribution that is evolving, and experiment to see if it has an equal or greater capacity to support the artists than the (outdated?) distribution system of record labels and retail shops.

Remember, the music industry tried to sue radio on the same grounds of copywright infringement. Eventually, it learned to work with radio's inherent marketing capabilities. And the existence of recorded music itself almost destroyed the profession of composer (the music industry now has to give money to a fund that supports living composers). And do you know who got the laws on copyright and intellectual property to be so strict in the first place? Walt Disney. One of the biggest crooks of the 20th century, I'd say.

And by some people's definition (say, Michael Cooney's), "If you know who wrote it, it's not folk music." So with all this discussion of royalty payments, intellectual property, etc, and this being a folk music forum, the issue could be raised that a great number of these songs are (or should be) in the public domain, and belonging to 'the people' anyway. Now, I wonder how many royalty dollars are going to some AP Carter fund somewhere, for new performances of songs that he neither wrote nor performed, but merely 'stole' from neighbors in the hills and had the sense to copyright when his family recorded them. In fact the whole folk process is a process of 'stealing' - ideas, techniques, songs, melodies, etc, and that's how it lives and grows.

Field recordings and folk song archives should be available to the public for free. Full stop. The library of congress, the Alan Lomax Collection. They belong to the people. Lomax was publicly funded. And in many cases, the musicians got nothing. When he recorded Son House and Willie Brown the unit of payment was a bottle of coca-cola. Willie Brown got the coke and Son House got nothing. And Rounder wants to charge us for it? Now the question has been raised "but who would spend countless hours ripping these old archive recordings and making them available, when there's no money in it?" Well, there's already a group of people doing essentially that: bloggers. Let Topic hand over its vault of unissued recordings to dedicated fans, collectors and bloggers who will do the work for the love of it. They even make homemade covers. And they will be able to distribute them and generate interest much better than the labels do (they already do this). And you will have a huge resource to folk music, which will serve musicians and create fans, saving both the trouble of buying the works of dead people and liberate them to spend that hard-earned cash in support of living musicians.

And if we can do that, maybe we can take a tip from organic farming and it's methods of CSA ("Community-Supported Agriculture") and generate a scheme of "CSM" (community-supported musicians), like France does for its artists, so that they are freed of the continuing struggle of trying to make a living with music in a crazy market economy, and instead are given a sufficient and consistent amount of money or food or housing or whatever is really needed to keep creating a better musical world for us.

Now, those are all issues of rights, morality, and money. I realize that these issues go deep with people. I don't pretend to have definitive answers to them, but I've tried to demonstrate my thoughts around them. I invite responses that confirm or contradict what I've said.

But I'd especially invite any responses that seriously consider the possibilities that the evolving world of information- and music-distribution offer, and look for ways to make the best of it. We've had 150 messages arguing about ethics, which doesn't change the situation a bit. Isn't it time we started looking for solutions? This is the largest online folk-music community in the world that I'm aware of. There's huge potential to actually do something positive instead of just getting upset, dontcha think?

Like, when a musician finds their album being downloaded on a blog, instead of saying "take this down immediately or I'll take legal action," what about saying "this album is still available at ___, how about just giving 2 tracks as a sample and providing a link" or "would you make a post of my upcoming tour dates so that all the people who read your blog and have been turned on to my music will be able to come see me live?" When you treat people like criminals, they behave that way. When you treat them like friends, they'll go out of their way to support you.

I'd say in my case, music piracy has transformed me from being an ignorant consumer to being a highly informed, broad-tasted connoisseur and collector and even expert in some arenas of music. I spend more on music now than I ever have, and pirate more too. And because I've downloaded for so long and I know all the right places to look, in most cases I can choose whether to get an album for free or to buy it. So I am free to support the artists I feel are most worthy (Jody Stecher springs to mind). And I do, because I realize that by supporting them, they can continue to make, perform, and record music. But in order for me to be able to really appreciate Jody Stecher (who I first heard on a download), I had to have already been turned onto bluegrass, old-timey music, Celtic music, Indian classical music, etc., which never would have happened without the online 'sharity' community. I know that as a musician it can be incredibly angering to find someone else giving away something you've worked so hard to create. But try to see it in the bigger picture, and maybe you can swim with the current rather than against it.