Pirating means you hate the things you claim to love. Deal with it.

rant.pngSo I saw a guy on Facebook defending his downloading of “gigabytes every day” of music.  (Which strikes me as a little strange – what are you doing, streaming FLAC?)  Anyway, his justification was this:  “Music should be free, artists should support themselves through touring and merch.  If that makes me a horrible person, so be it.”

As a creative person (who actually makes some – but not a lot) of money from doing creative work on the internet, I thought I’d just share my reply verbatim. 

[Pirating] doesn’t make you a horrible person.  It makes you someone who wants to see the things they love go away.

Why?  Every second spent on merch (or every second an artist is touring) is a second they can’t be making more of the music and art you love.   And that’s not counting the artists (musical or otherwise) who are great at making their art… but crap at touring or creating gear.  (Example:  Deathmøle.  One guy with a [guitar and a] sequencer.  Some of the greatest instrumental metal out there, IMHO.)

Experience?  Yeah – I’m an author who is also a small publisher (of other people’s work).  Doing the publishing stuff has SERIOUSLY cut into my writing time.

Support what you love, or expect it to go away.  It’s not me judging, it’s just the way it goes. 

One thought on “Pirating means you hate the things you claim to love. Deal with it.

  1. Just like "I don't mean to offend anyone but…", anytime someone says "if that makes me a horrible person…" it automatically means, YES YOU ARE A HORRIBLE PERSON! Some people are just so dense and don't get it.

    What, you mean actions have consequences? That doesn't make sense. I thought the only consequence is that I have more free music than hours in the day to listen to? You mean my actions might impact others? Nonsense!

    Plus I like the sense of entitlement that he gets to decide how musicians will earn their money. I'm sure he has some grand business plan for how the music industry should restructure itself and it's not at all about not wanting to pay for stuff. Because he is certainly going to ALL of the concerts and buying ALL of the merchandise for the gigabytes of music downloaded. Otherwise he's are just a cheap jerk who wants free stuff.

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