I haunt the Usenet and download new albums. If I like them I buy them. I have bought more CDs in the past few years than I did in the entire decade previous. Here's a little anecdote. I downloaded the latest Roseann Cash album "Rules of Travel". Played it a couple of times, realized that it was a terrific piece of work, and went out and bought it. When I brought the CD home I found out that it had some sort of copy protection mechanism that required me to install a program on the disk in order to play it on my computer. This is different from the driver install that is bypassable by holding down the shift key. Now I don't know about you, but I don't install any programs that I don't know about. I went through the DOS, Win 3.1, and Win 95 years and I have seen too many programs butcher operating systems. I won't play this CD on the computer, I'll just continue listening to the MP3s ( BTW, it took me less that 5 minutes to figure out how to bypass the security and rip the tracks to a much higher quality than I originally downloaded). Here's the irony: I never would have even heard this album if it wasn't for the Usenet. It gets no airplay where I live, and no one I know is familiar with it. I enjoy the album, own it, and would never have even heard it if the Internet did not exist. How many other great albums are gathering dust because the recording industry has their collective heads up their collective wazzoos.
