Nickell’s Bag

No, you can’t copy my CDs.

There, I’ve said it. I’ve tried to avoid the issue, tried to change the subject. I’ve made up too many excuses. But at this point I’m tired of being asked.

I hate to be a curmudgeon, hate to be uncool. I understand you’re broke. (So am I.) I know that I’ll still have my CDs, just as good as they were before, after you copy them.

And I will be the first to admit that I’ve done my share of “borrowing” and “lending” over the years. I never got into the online music sharing thing, but that was mostly because I got plenty of music to love directly from my friends; and I gave back. Most of the new music I heard in the last years of the 90s and the early days of this new millennium came to me in the form of homemade CDs scrawled over with a Sharpie. And I gave back. Just before my grandmother died, I made her a 20-CD set of my favorite classical music.

But my thinking has changed over recent years.

The real change for me came after a friend of my wife’s stopped through town a few years ago. Pretty much the whole time of her visit, she spent ripping our CD collection. She didn’t even ask if it was ok. It bothered me at the time, but I hesitated to raise a stink; and really, I wasn’t exactly sure how I felt about it.

On the one hand, she was showing some degree of trust that our music collection was worth exploring; and my CDs were still there when she left. On the other hand, she was freeloading not only from the artists who made those CDs, but also from the people who paid for them – namely, my wife and I.

That was an extreme case, obviously. But since then, I’ve had no small number of friends ask if they can essentially do the same thing. I’ve rarely said no; I’ve simply changed the subject, or “forgotten” to lend my CDs.

We can argue about the high price of CDs and the questionable quality of music that the major labels foist upon us. We can agree that there’s a vast gray area encircling this issue. I personally still consider it ethical to share mix-CDs of individual tracks by various artists: In those samplers, I reason, my friends might find a taste of something they want to buy in whole.

But ultimately, as I’ve watched my musician friends struggle to break even on their records, and as I’ve watched the music industry as a whole implode in the face of online file-sharing, I’ve become ever more conscious that every CD I take or give away is another CD that some musician might not sell.

I find that I can no longer ethically justify treating good music as if it has no value – and treating musicians as if they don’t deserve to earn a living.

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the first release of Napster, the peer-to-peer file-sharing service that ushered in the heyday of online music piracy. I know my own stance about music sharing has changed – several times – in the past decade.

What’s your thinking these days?

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