Music For Free

Have just downloaded a very tasty live track from Porcupine Tree from those good people at Burning Shed. Gradually I appear to be getting sucked in by the new technology, and, yes, I know there's absolutely nothing new about downloading music, but I'm speaking in strictly relative terms here. I still don't really like the idea of owning music without some kind of disk to own it on, and I don't think I ever will, but when you get it for free as in the case of this download who really cares?

By the way, I need to emphasise that the download was perfectly legal as Burning Shed have a free download page. It's not that I aspire to be terribly moral about illegal downloading of music; in some ways I rather enjoy the big record companies getting their comeuppance. But the idea of ripping off the actual guys who produce the sounds does bother me to the extent that I can't step over that line. It feels too much like robbing a friend, romantic as that may be.

I'm also already beginning to feel a bit of a moral obligation to make some real purchases from the Shed having sampled one of their delights for free. It helps that they promote the kind of music I suppose I most deeply believe in as worthy of my support. A similar consideration lay behind my thinking in buying a CD on the streets of Melbourne recently after watching a very talented busker demonstrate just how well a classical guitar can be played outside the concert hall. It was quite by accident I got to watch him. The girls had all gone off shopping, leaving me sitting on a convenient bench on the street reading Sketches By Boz. The guitarist, whom I later found out was called Tom Ward, set up just across from me and entertained the world and no one in particular for forty captivating minutes before I had to set off in search of the shoppers, and I couldn't leave without a CD from the maestro (which is what I reckon he was.) Noi agreed, having been around for the second twenty minutes of the free concert.

There are some astoundingly talented people around - more than we sometimes realise -and we are lucky to have them.