I'm a criminal music downloader. I illegally obtain files from the internet and other sources, and I do it with more glee than a Europorn actress having jizz splashed on her face in slow motion. I download music I don't even want or will ever listen to — gigabytes of the stuff — just so I can give the recording industry a good, slow, agonising assfuck from the comfort of my own chair. It's brilliant, it's the best passive/aggressive toy I've ever owned, and with it I can remotely stick tiny little needles under the nails of record executives the world over. Man, am I outrageously happy or what?! Who knew that these retarded, money-grubbing fuckers could be brought to their knees with just a few clicks of a mouse?

And brought to their knees they should be, without a doubt. For years they have enjoyed a monopoly, where they controlled the price of music and kept it artifically high to fuck us over. Personally, I don't think I would feel so good about stealing shit from people if they hadn't spent the last 4 decades rubbing our noses in it. For close to 50 years, they set up their industry as one filled to bursting point with drugs, babes, Jack Daniels, and every ridiculous excess known to man. Producers dated models and drove Bugattis, rock stars snorted cocaine off underage groupies' tits while having their knob polished by Pamela Anderson. Stories were written, sometimes entirely fictitiously, about how much richer, cooler, hotter, better hung, and more complete these talentless fucks were compared to us music-consuming scuttlefish. All of which was paid for by you and me, when we swallowed a 1000% markup on CDs. We had to idolise pop stars because then it would be much easier to sell us more shit. Now we're supposed to care that they've fallen on hard times? Fuck right off.

When these brain-damaged fuckers start moaning about the "morality" of downloading music, I just wanna reach for my Uzi and go on a Columbine-style rampage. There is nothing "moral" about the music industry, there never has been. These are the same people who keep artists hooked on smack to control them. Records labels have become music pushers and rock star pimps, no more. They know we want it, they know we'll pay top dollar, and they're gonna make sure they get stupefyingly rich in the process. The huge irony of course is that the massively powerful and successful marketing machines become the industry's own worst nightmare. We're told all day, every day, that "this new Black Eyed Peas CD is the best thing ever, everyone's gonna have it, you're gonna get so much sex if you own it too, you'll do practically anything to get your hands on it!"... and then it's OUR fault when we want it so bad that we'll do practically anything to get our hands on it, like illegally downloading it? Where's the fucking logic?

"But it costs money to produce an album"
Is that right? How much fucking money does it take to take the same, moronic rap beat and have some skank wail over it like she's driving across a ploughed field in a tractor with weights tied to her vulva? Can't these irritating bitches just sing the one note that the composer put on the paper? The reason it costs so much money to produce a CD is because the record company basically buys your interest in it. It's not new, it's not unique, it's not even good, but they know if they stick it in your face for 2 weeks on telly, radio, magazines and billboards you'll eventually have to like it. So most of the money goes into promoting and selling generic and mediocre muzak, not paying the artists.

But even if every cent is given to poor, starving studio producers and crusty muso's, just think for a second and stop swallowing their propaganda:

Both CDs and DVDs cost about the same to manufacture, they have much the same distribution cost, so how come we pay six times the amount for CDs if it's all down to cost?

"Home downloading/taping/loading/ripping is killing Music™"
No, not really. Music itself will never die. What might become extinct is their cushy fucking lifestyles and ridiculous overindulgence. What might die is the notion of getting a half-naked bimbo who can't even play music to lip-sync to someone else's song in a hip and funky music video, simply to make a quick buck. What we might finally put on the endangered list is 7 people on stage, none of whom play a musical instrument, wearing $1000 takkies and name-dropping their sponsor into their lyrics. Which is fine by me. If that is what music is these days, I hope home downloading does kill it, I have no fucking problem with that. Musicians will always make music, whether they get rich or not, because they feel driven to do so. Not because they want to stink-finger Christie Brinkley.

"Last year, the music industry lost $500 billion because of music downloads"
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. These kind of ridiculous statements remind me of a headline in an alarmist local newspaper: 92% of crime goes unpunished! How the fuck do you know? How do you get these statistics? Do you ask every possible criminal (that's pretty much everyone on some level) whether or not they'd ever committed a crime and got away with it? Is this some kind of new police brain-damage I hadn't been aware of? Similarly, there is no way you can ever estimate how much money was lost in any given year. Lost money is money you never had, and therefore could not count. Let me put it this way: not every person who downloads an album would have bought it if it weren't online for free. People who can afford to buy CDs are still buying CDs, the rest is free fucking advertising. So shut the fuck up.

"Artists are starving because of You"
Hopefully this is true. Because artists write much better music when they're hungry. And it's not as if they're entirely blameless. Musicians in decades to come will look back at the class of 1990 who fucked it all up for everyone. Instead of getting a decent salary for 100 years, they crammed their payment schedule into 5 years. They got fabulously wealthy, even the ones hooked on smack, and gleefully mocked us from atop their marble staircases. Of course we got pissed off. This is the digital French Revolution and we're at the forefront of storming the Bastille. Next stop: Britney Spears's house.