I still remember the glory days. Somehow, Audiogalaxy became installed on our home computer. My brother must have done it. In one night, I could download twelve to fourteen songs – almost an entire album! We had 28k dial-up Internet. The kind that when you connected, it tied up the phone line and made horrible sounds. I lived on a farm next to a small town. It had a population of 200 people. The closest place to buy music resided eighty miles away. So, being that I couldn't drive, had a pittance of an allowance, and my family rarely visited the big city, I used to download music. Of course, I had no real concept of what file-sharing was until I was older. And even then, I wouldn't say that I had as firm of a grasp on what I was doing as I do now. Why did my brother and I share music? Well, it would've been impossible to download anything else. The files would've been too big. Few years later, I remember being introduced to BitComet. I had a friend with high-speed cable Internet and a taste for downloading anything and everything that he could. Mostly, just to prove that he was smart enough to do it. Games, software, movies, and comics – whatever he could think of. This was 2005. One of the main reasons why music became so popular is because it was the smallest file. Had movies been easier to share, things may have gone differently. Fast forward to today and things are going differently. Now everything has been made available, torrents are mainstream, and – who doesn't have high-speed internet? – the things that people download off the web are changing. A new study shows that music only beats out ebooks in popularity. What? Yeah, music is being traded far less than films, pornography, TV shows, video games, and computer software. Imagine what will happen when the over eight million new Kindle owners in 2010 figure out how to pirate books in 2011. Will music be cannibalized by book sharing? You never know.As in stands, looking at the 10,000 most popular files being shared pirates want movies more than music, "and by a significant margin," Nate Anderson states.Pirates ❤ Hollywood blockbusters and Microsoft Word – bored of your album.Now what?
(Image Credit: Ars)
