The Blueprint 3

For the first time in probably 10 or 15 years I have bought an album. As you can probably see in the “Senaste musiken” (I should probably translate these things to english :P) feed out to the right here on the blog I have listened to it a lot. The best song is definitely “Empire State of Mind” featuring Alicia Keys. And if you don’t know it already the main artist of the album is Jay-Z. By far the coolest guy in the music industry, a true business-man (but not in a 50 cent kind of way) and is one of the most respectable men I know of.

Anyway, the record cost 90 SEK on iTunes, which is like $13 or €9. Why did I buy it and not just download it?
Well because of two things really. I hate to admit it, but honestly, one of the reasons I bought it is because of the inaccessibility of a good site to download quality in original releases. One of those sites was what.cd, but I was (unjustly) banned from that site and I haven’t had the energy to get another account or try to find another site.

Part of this being the reason is also that I’m getting lazier as I get older and get more other shit to worry about. When I switched to Mac i stopped worrying about hardware altogether, sure – a Mac costs a bit more, but you don’t have to worry about anything ever again. It’s worth the money to not have to worry and to just have everything served up for you (It’s kind of like eating at a restaurant compared to cooking at home).

Right now I’m just in a place in my life where finding a good tracker and downloading the music (like 20-30 minutes of work) is just not worth the $13 that I will save.

I think this is something very general, young people with a lot of time on their hands will always pirate – and they should! That’s how the artists get famous, that’s how stuff get around. How many good designers would we have today if every kid had to pay $4000 for Photoshop or whatever insane amount it costs?

But as people get money and less time it’s natural that they start paying for things. This is how I think it has always been and I think this is how it will always be.

The second part of me buying it is that I know Jay-Z owns his own record-company. Which means the money actually does go to him. Give me an opportunity to pay the artist and not the leeching record company and I will pay every time! And on top of that, it’s $13.. the prices of record are actually getting quite reasonable and it’s not like this is going to ruin me.