Oh, hush. Information may want to be free, but you want to buy music, and you know you do. You just don’t want to pay too much for it. Neither do I. When I was eleven and they raised the price of 7” singles at Zody’s to $3.50, I swore to God I was never gonna buy one again. (Memo to God: I am sorry that I lied to You.) The introduction of the compact disc led record companies to try some snake-oil salesman-level bamboozling, and they raised album prices to absurd heights even as their costs fell through the floor. No wonder everybody felt so little shame about file-sharing; no wonder people resorted to some fairly cocaine-addict-level rationalization when asked to differentiate file-sharing from simple theft. The record companies have spent their entire business lives figuring out how to squeeze us like juicy oranges. Napster was our chaotic little Take Back the Night rally.
