Digital Sea, Available Free

I was six the first time I stole music. I tuned the radio to Hot 99.9, waited for a favorite song, hit "record" on my Fisher Price tape recorder, and made as little noise as possible while the precious tunes imprinted on the rolling strip inside the cassette.

...Until I got distracted and wandered off to play Barbie, leaving Casey Kasem to his own devices. Somewhere, there's a box of homemade cassettes filled with hours of Top 40, complete with ads and a background soundtrack of my sister and me fighting over whose Barbie got to wear the hot pink skirt with the purple sequins.

I upgraded to a dual cassette recorder in third grade, and later made mix tapes from CDs. Throughout high school, I probably made and received an average of one mix tape a week.

It's hard to remember now exactly when Napster entered my field of awareness. I must have been a junior in college, because I remember sitting at my desk with my roommate, the two of us so excited we were literally crammed into one chair and leaning forward, our heads together, toward the monitor, feverishly downloading every random thing we could think of, including "Woke Up This Morning," the Alabama 3 song from the opening credits of The Sopranos.

We had a blast. And, since we were downloading music we would never have purchased (remember, this was pre-itunes, so things like "Woke Up This Morning" weren't necessarily readily available via any other means), it didn't feel like stealing. Or at least, not stealing that mattered.

Besides, I'd been stealing music for years. And what musician in her right mind would begrudge her inclusion on my mix tapes? Isn't it an honor, a joy, if someone loves your music so much that she must include it on the tape she's about to give her boyfriend?

This is how I justified my theft of music, via Napster. It didn't seem, initially, to be much different. And though I didn't end up downloading very much, since the program hogged my computer and I deleted it fairly quickly, it was years before I really understood why Napster was bad for music--for the musicians and the audience.

I got my first job when I was 14. My mom had to sign working papers for me. It was a tipped job bussing tables at an upscale restaurant, and I often made about $100/night (which very nearly made up for the indignity of wearing a red bow tie). This would have been in... 1996 or so, when we still had a music store in town and CDs cost between $15 and $20. So, naturally, I thought of my salary in terms of how much new music it could get me: Instead of thinking, "Great, I earned $100 tonight," I thought, "Nice. Five CDs."

In other words, music was something I worked for. The musicians worked to make it, and I worked to own it. And I valued it as such. My CD collection was organized, and I took pride in keeping the jewel cases pristine. I pored over the liner notes, and was always disappointed when the physical design of the album wasn't up to scratch.

I made mixes, of course, but this added to the number of hours I dedicated to any given song, which added, rather than detracted, from the value of the music. I also received mixes, and valued them as well, not just for the music itself, but for the work my friends had poured into them.

Downloading music illegally involves exactly none of the above steps. Instead of valuing the music by virtue of the work involved in its acquisition, we've come to see musicians as people who owe it to us to give away their work because we can't be bothered to pay for it. There seems to be this idea floating out there that music is so fun to make, and being a musician is such a great job, that the artists pretty much owe it to us to keep at it, whether they make any money or not. And anyway, we all know that they make more money than we do, so it's a victimless crime, right?

I'm not going to sit here on my self-righteous high horse and suggest that Madonna has been financially stripped by Internet vultures. Lady Gaga has more money than a person could spend in three lifetimes. And there certainly have been unknown artists who have benefited, sometimes hugely, by "giving away" their music until they were "discovered" by the big labels and turned into overnight millionaires (Justin Bieber, anyone?)

But it's not just the individual musician who stands to lose in a culture that devalues music and art, which our culture undoubtedly does (how many school art programs have survived the current economic problems?). It's also the loss we all experience when we forget that art is important. That it has value--it adds enormous value to our lives, but only if we acknowledge that value do we truly benefit from it.

I don't know what teenagers are like today. Surely some are still pouring over the digital equivalent of the liner notes. Surely some still work for music. And maybe my friends and I were more unusual than I realize, and most of our peers simply listened to whatever came on the radio. I don't know. But I do believe there has been a fundamental shift in the way we value music, as well as writing and visual art. Because there ARE plenty of people willing to do it for free (blogging has proven disastrous to the field of journalism, for instance), and I believe the audience loses as much as the artist when such devaluation becomes mainstream.

-Lex