thirteenth

Do I consider myself as a bad person if I download music from the internet? No I don't, surprise!?
I grew up in finland, in a middle-class suburb, went to average middle-class schools and did (in 70's standards) average middle-class boy stuff with my friends. One of the things was to buy C-cassettes, go to my friend's home, since he had a record player (and Stereo/HiFi-VCR & Videogame & C64 - I did not :D). I used to get the albums recorded to my cassettes (TDK is still up and running). The albums my friend or his family had or the ones I borrowed from the local public library. The libraries, btw, are one of the most important things available. Hopefully they stay free of charge everywhere! Back then I used to have quite broad taste of music, at least thinking about t now, from Dire Straits to Hanoi Rocks plus everything else in the middle and both sides ;). Since nobody told me what was cool to listen and what was not. And, thanks to my friends, it was a serious fun to sit in a darkened living room and fall in to the musical world of Love Over Gold. Or to the finnish broadcast company (YLE) version of Hitchhikers Guide to Galaxy. Doesn't happen too often nowadays. The actual musical experience is lost between zillions of distractions. And the music is the background noice everywhere. For me it's kind of sad to loose the actual meaning of the music that way. Does it make Live-music more valuable, I think it does. And me, myself, I fill my working days background with music, definitely.
But the whole point in here was the thing that I haven't been paying for my music before, mainly. Other than that, the fact that if you can get something for free from the web, why shouldn't you take it? So it is ok.
Or at least partly. Of course I would be more attached to the music, if I would have to do at least something for it, like walk to the library, borrow a CD and then rip it at home after I've been listening weither it's ok or not. Nowadays the music is so easy to get that you just do it, constantly, without paying too much attentition to it at all. So getting the music has fallen in to the same slot of background noice than the music itself. Sort of greedy mix between laziness and hoarding...
And no, I'm not concidering myself being a better man while doing this. Not at all. The whole society is so easy nowadays, that you can just slip downstream with everybody else without paying attention to anything. And there's the value for myself being tested. Do I have enough will power to create some countermovement actions to my personal life to fight against the boring life inside this world? (London's Burning with boredom now). To activate myself to actally DO something for the things I'm keen to and not just wait for them to swim in my Net-For-The-Torrents :D.

And after all, I'm still not the right guy to judge am I good or bad...