I was reading this
article in the New York Times about how people in general seem to have moved away from illegal P2P like BitTorrent to more legit forms of accessing media. Analyzing my own behavior I have to agree! I was in 8th grade when Napster came out back in 2000. I was using dial up on NetZero (which was slow enough as it was even on 56k modems), but I would saturate my connection downloading music. Piracy was my entry into the world of music. The release of Napster made me completely skip the whole CD stage back when people were just getting off tapes to move to CDs. I have to admit I have bought at most two or three music CDs total in my life (but I am sure I made it up by going to a bunch of concerts for the bands I like most). I used to download a lot of music to say the least, but the last couple years I have slowly dwindled my downloads to almost nothing.
In the last two to three years I have been much more inclined to use services like last.fm and Pandora for listening to music. They do a great job of giving a variety of choice to actually listen to music. Further, I have also gone to using Hulu for watching TV shows (which are all of Simpsons, Daily Show, The Office) where before I used to download the torrents. It has just become easier to use these online sources to attain legal music and video. It just seems that it's a lot more convenient to wait for the show to come online and then watching it, even with advertising, than it is to download the thing off BitTorrent. For BitTorrent, I have to find the correct torrent and all that jazz, where I can just find the correct one easily on Hulu.
This is basically my path:
- Napster
- Kazaa
- Morpheous
- BitTorrent
- last.fm
- Pandora
- Hulu
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