Ahhh, Pirate Bay, Mininova, and a few other sources i dare not reveal for fear of blowing up my spots… free music is everywhere on the internet, all the time. Sure, the quality of a lot of these files might be low, but the price is right, and the accessibility is 24/7. Granted, I much prefer to own the vinyl, but in this day and age of mixtapes, unsigned artists, and singles releases, everything I want and need doesn’t get get pressed on wax. And while I’m in my mid-20′s and can kind of sort of remember buying CDs, I wonder about those in their teens who have never known a life without unfettered free access to music online. Well, according to the findings of recent a study published on BBC.com, ‘illegal downloading amongst young music fans has actually gone into a decline, and that the CD is still the most popular format, even amongst teenagers, and is not ready to be sent to the digital graveyard just yet.’
Sorry BBC, but I just don’t buy it… with the high price and low selection of CDs, and the internet-savy approach of the teenaged generation, I don’t see how this is possible. Perhaps we’ve stepped away from the big illegals like Limewire, etc, but now we’ve moved on to sites with shielded, floating IP address, and the mass hosting of .zip or .rar files, all stored for easy downloading. And then there’s the massive hard drive swaps I’ll do with anyone who has worthy music/movies/tv to trade.
You can always count on relatively intelligent commenting on these BBC blogs. This is one is some of the best I’ve seen thus far: very much worth the read to see how readers tear the original study apart due to flawed sample size and approach. So while the record companies and backwards-looking artists would like to be believe some sort of moral order or lawfulness has returned to downloading, I would have to claim the opposite: the youth are just get much more nuanced and a whole lot sneakier.
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We’ve spoken of the 3.0 software update here on 84/85 
