Although my title is from a Depeche Mode album, the content of this article is a bit different.

I was watching some videos on YouTube today, because I wanted to find some good songs for my mother to buy from i-tunes for the i-phone. One of them was Bjork’s Army of me. Now, I could see the video but I could not hear anything and I noticed this message below the video: NOTICE This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by all copyright holders. The audio has been disabled.

I have to clarify that I have quite many cds and two collectible dvds with her best video clips, because I really like her. But I rarely use them to watch videos or listen to music on my pc. So, I use YouTube, to watch a video and then do whatever it was I was doing in the first place. So what is really the purpose of this “restriction”? You might tell me okay, you have those cds and stuff, but not everyone else does.

But how am I supposed to convince my mother, who lives in another country, and therefore I cannot give her my cds, that Bjork is really worth her money? I mean sharing music makes artists become known, does it not?

Recently I heard that most artists make the vast majority of their money from their concerts, and how am I supposed to know if I want to go to a concert if I don’t hear someone’s music before? And this applies to buying the cd as well.

But things have changed the last years. People don’t buy that many cds, cause there is the internet and cds are not convenient, they need space to store them and you have to find the cd and put it in your player etc. Plus most of the times you don’t want to listen to a whole cd, so you can’t have 20 cds in front of you to listen to one song and then put the other one and so on.

But generally I would not buy a cd with a nice cover to discover a new artist. And most of the music I like is not mainstream and you can’t even find it in shops. If you find a store, because they sell specialized music they charge you twice the price, which is NOT cool.

And for many years, I used soulseek, an ad-free, free-to-share-music program with the music I wanted. And I discovered amazing music and I loved artists and I went to their concerts, or in some rare cases, bought their cds. So they won. I don’t know about their record companies and if they even had any, but they were really lucky soulseek was around, if it weren’t for it, no one would even know their names. Not because they are not worth it, but because no one would ever have the chance to get to know them.

And now comes the title. All this does not apply to music for the masses. The masses buy Madonna, Britney Spears and other mainstream garbage.

Or do they? I mean, believing that I am one of the few people in this planet who “search” their music before they decide to listen to it, is kind of egoistic. Maybe there are no masses anymore, and people actually think for themselves, and maybe they do not buy what big companies want to sell them, only for the sake of money, without any artistic content whatsoever.

Plus, there is the radio. You can listen to endless radio music stations, which are technically free. Of course you listen to ads, but you can choose if you buy these products or not. My favorite radio station has totally irrelevant advertisements to my interests, so I would never buy one of the products they proudly advertise, and if the ads are really annoying I choose to buy something else instead.

So what is their profit from me? I just listen to my favorite songs and don’t pay for anything. Is that not piracy? Do the record companies not feel exploited and offended, or whatever it is they feel? Do I not infringe or violate their copyrights?

Last year Radiohead released a new cd, In Rainbows. They decided to get rid of the middle man and distribute their music themselves. Through their website, you could download it for whatever price you wanted to pay for it. Which was kinda nice, because music is priceless after all.Truth be told, you cannot put a price to it, neither should you pay the same amount of money for every artist.

I cannot help but wonder why is it that, let’s say, singers makes crazy money for something that really needs no crazy effort, but a construction worker who may risk his life every day or at least his health can barely cope with his expenses. But that is another story.

The point is that a new era has began a long time ago. But the middle ages aged men who run the record companies know nothing about internet, and in some cases about music itself. They try to intimidate people by sending e-mails, demanding unsuspected people to pay fines, for unreal crimes. They have even sent those bills to dead people, or people who have no computers at all. But in any case they have no right to violate your computer’s privacy without your permission. And as, for every action there is a reaction, people began to fight back with lawsuits.

All that for music, which should give pleasure. Unless it is not about music, hmmm….