Last night Bif Naked was on Buffy, and I liked her well enough to download some of her songs from Napster, which I've been playing all day. I've decided that I like her well enough to go buy the CD.

Segue into a rant about all this Napster rigamarole ...

Here in the middle of the United States, you don't get exposed to very much music that's not on somebody's Top 40 list (or on TRL). If it weren't for being able to trade mp3's online, I'd never have been exposed to Bif Naked, VAST, Sleater-Kinney, Blue October, or any of the other bands or artists I've come to appreciate lately.

What's more, I don't go buy music that I can hear on the radio. This is mostly a hold-over from my childhood, when we didn't have money for things like CD's (or even cassette tapes), so I had to content myself with the radio. As I began making my own money, my music buying fund always went for things I couldn't hear on the radio. Part of this is because I'm cheap and don't like to pay for music I can hear for free. It's also because the radio stations play the same crap over and over again and by the time I have money to blow on CD's, I'm sick to death of every single song that I hear on the radio.

I've bought cd's of bands I've downloaded from Napster. That goes against my policy of not paying for music I can get for free, but if I rely on my mp3's for my listening pleasure, I'll only ever get to listen to good music while I'm at work, on my high bandwidth computer. I can't listen to mp3's in my car, and I don't have enough bandwidth to download them at home -- even if I did, the sound on my laptop is pitiful. So, I go buy the cd.

My cd collection has increased exponentially since I've begun using Napster. From what I've seen of recent cd sales figures, this is true for a lot of people.

The way I see it, Napster is a lot like a pirate radio station, except that we get to program our own music. And it's still a lot more difficult and expensive to burn an mp3 into a recordable cd than it is to tape a song off of the radio or dub a cd. How is the online trading of mp3's any worse, any more of a copyright infringement, than trading custom cassettes full of unauthorized copies of music? Somebody please explain this to me. I just don't get it.