Do you ever find yourself missing the glory days of downloading free music online without feeling like you were stealing or breaking any laws? You remember those days, right? Back when we all used to have BearShare and other peering software on our computers and spent hours upon hours downloading the latest tracks from around the world and grabbing the latest tracks from other countries before they were even heard in the United States. If you are over the age of 30, you’ll remember them well along with that vast music collection you used to have where you could play anything you wanted with just the click of your mouse. What happened to change all that?
It is quite simple really. Record companies and musicians realized how much revenue they were loosing to this type of activity and realized people were almost literally stealing money right from their pockets. Why would anyone go out and pay for their music if they could just download it for free? These artists and record companies became outraged and presented the activity as unethical and equated it to stealing a CD from your local record store. We didn’t realize it at the time but the days of finding free music download sites were quickly coming to an end.
It took a bit of time for the rest of us to catch on to what these record companies and artists were saying but once we really thought about it, we realized they were right. After all, you would want people staling from you in this manner, right? Eventually, we all adapted to the new social morals and began deleting that stockpile of free music what had all apparently obtained illegally. I still remember that day very well, the nasty pit in my stomach but with a tear in my eye, I forced myself to delete these illegally obtained songs. Sometimes I feel like an old man for saying it but I really do miss the days when it was so easy to download free music.