I am a criminal. And a shameless one at that, especially when it comes to stealing music. It has been one of my major pastimes over the past few years, having downloaded around 2500 tracks over the past half decade.
I was at it again today. As I mentioned in a previous posting, I am going through a musically fallow period at the moment where I’m not hearing a lot of new music that I like. Last night, however, I downloaded some new DJ sets from ump3.de, including a couple of sets from Axwell, who still seems to stand head and shoulders above any other (pop) house DJs around today.
In his (and every other DJ’s) sets, there are usually a few tracks that I really like, with the remainder that are so-so. I try and download the tracks that I like as separate MP3’s.
The problem for many years was, how the hell do I know the names of the tracks that I really like when there are no track listings available?
The answer, as I figured out over the years, is the following.
Listen out for the lyrics and write down as much of them as you can remember, and then type them into Google together with the word lyrics.
So it’s been a long time coming but I like what I hear from the … to the bass lyrics resulted in my finding:
TV Rock ft. Rudy – It’s Been A Long Time (Axwell Remode)
And let me see you moving shaking cross the dancefloor lyrics produced:
Treasure Fingers – Cross The Dancefloor (Laidback Luke Remix)
It’s then just a question of opening up Limewire and grabbing myself a copy. If there’s nothing on Limewire, then it’s a bit more of a hassle. Another possibility is to go to The Pirate Bayand try and find a Torrent, however, it seems to be quite hard to find individual tracks as Torrents as usually people only upload entire CD’s.
So if that doesn’t work, the only option is to Google the following:
<artist> <title> mp3 free download
It can be very time-consuming to find a track this way, but the track can usually be found (but make sure that you have good anti-virus protection as the sites with these downloads can sometimes be found are often riddled with viruses [or should the plural of virus be 'viri'?])
As someone who has spent most of their life making a living from selling intellectual property, it might be considered as being somewhat hypocritical to have such a cavalier attitude to the subject of copyright theft and, to a certain extent, it is somewhat true. However, my defense is that I consider that the music industry has been, in the past, an exceptionally greedy entity that is now getting exactly what it deserves.
I lost count years ago, but I would imagine that, over my lifetime, the music industry has probably taken me for around $20-30,000 judging by the amount of CD’s that I have amassed (now somewhere or other in Prague – I don’t know exactly where – I haven’t seen them for nearly six years now).
I got caught up in the same madness as everyone else did in those days before MP3’s became commonplace. I too was a sucker who would pay $15+ to buy a CD that maybe contained a couple of good tracks with the rest of them being fillers. But not any longer.
The new age of iPods, YouTube and MP3’s has made me realize what a rip-off the whole concept of ‘albums’ or CD’s really are. I really can’t think of any album made over the years where I really enjoyed every single track – the majority of the tracks were usually pretty rubbish ones that you had to endure to get to the next good one, so I ended up begrudging paying for them.
Another thing that really annoys me about the music business is that the production costs of music are getting smaller all of the time, yet the purchase price always seemed to get higher and higher, which just seemed to be a case of the music industry taking the piss.
OK, so I must admit that I kind of lost track of the relative buying prices of CD’s versus DVD’s and computer games since I became poor in the early Noughties, but at that point a music CD in the UK could cost around GBP15.99 (say $30) with a movie on DVD costing around GBP9.99 (say $18) and a computer game costing around GBP29.99 (say $50).
This always seemed to be totally out of proportion with the costs of production for each of the mediums. Hollywood blockbusters involve a cast of many thousands costing anywhere from $50-200 million. Computer games involve a cast of many hundreds and cost maybe $5-30 million.
Today, a lot of music is made by one person using a laptop using freeware and so is produced for practically nothing. I know this because several of my friends in Latvia produce their own tracks and you’d be hard pressed to tell the results of their works from much more famous artists.
So where has all of the money been going all these years?
On sales and marketing of manufactured acts that need to be forced upon the public rather than those that rise to the top due to their merits alone – that’s where. And I don’t see why I should pay money so that so manufactured act consisting of good lucking guys or chicks who can’t sing a note, but know how to dance (i.e. Pussycat Dolls), can be made popular for a bunch of tweens who don’t know any better than to like what they’re supposed to like.
So, in summary, the music industry has consisted to date of a bunch of greedy leeches and the sooner that they are forced to downsize because they’re not making enough money as a result of people like me taking what music they want the happier I’ll be.
1 Comment
November 11, 2008 at 11:40 pm
Another good Google search method is the query;
-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +size +(mp3|aac) “search-item-here”
cheers