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What I dislike the most about downloading is the culture it created. Because paying for music is seen more and more like a gesture deserving contempt (hello Derek), you now have a trillion musicians constantly throwing their product at you, often with nothing more than a posterior- licking review that in 90% of cases is so aridly devoid of any critical objectivness, it makes you feel like really downloading the thing and let your ears do the judgement. I could name countless reviews that fooled me that way, being an enthusiast and all that. Doing the job of selling your own music and promoting it is stressful enough as it is; reducing a musician to acts of desperation worthy ofa fruit and veg merchant trying to sell the last few rotting oranges at closing time progressively cheapens the experience and demotivates any creative skill that once might have been there. And what sort of fan do you end up with? One that is so ''devoted'' to your craft, they expect the final product to appear on their hard drive free of charge. Until said ''fans'' get sick of it and move on to the ''tell the worldwide web how this record is shit'' phase. Which the artist won't have the time to follow, what with being too busy putting together their next 50 copy cdr release. And this without even mentioning that, as if by magic, self-contextualising your own music and working on its allure seems a vulgar attempt at self-promotion much more than yourself shoving product down people's throats. How odd.
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