Great read
Also an interesting article! I'm actually for people buying music, but I think the music industry has done such a tremendously poor job at keeping up with technology. People listen to music on digital formats these days and the music indutry needs to sell their music in such a way that it gets easier to pay for it than it is to steal it. It sounds hard, but I think Spotify is a service that has that potential. Installing it basically gives you instant access to tons of music - so much that downloading it all would take a lot of time - and free users occasionally get commercials in between songs while paying customers don't.
I'm amazed something like this didn't come sooner because it's that kind of solutions the music industry needs. CDs and other physical mediums will become more and more collectors items for the interested minority so what they have to make money on is a simple to use digital music provider (websites selling mp3s are often just as hard as pirating the songs, so they're not good enough in my opinion).
Also, I don't agree that piracy is the same as stealing which is a popular claim. You're not taking something away from someone, you're making a copy of it. The only thing you are stealing is potential - there was a chance you would spend money on the CD that you just downloaded. If that chance was 0 and you don't distribute, then the industry lost nothing. If, based on what you heard, you decide to spend money on the band whose music you downloaded but never would've bought the CD from when they play a gig in your town, it could be a net gain to the industry - or at least the artists. Of course there's a net loss from the industry these days, but I agree there are so many positives with free music that I don't really think the comparison to stealing really fits.