mix tapes

I’m a music lover. ask a seatmate of mine an annoying thing about me and you’d receive a response saying that I sing during class. sometimes I’m not even aware of it.
I learned to love music from listening to the radio. our karaoke and a walkman were my favorite things. I would listen to rx, lsfm, magic 899, kool 106, 939 kcfm, nu107, cross over 883 and a bunch of other stations whenever I could. And since as a student, I never had enough money to buy 500 peso cds, I recorded music from the radio. I made my own mix tapes. And once I finished a whole cassette, I’d feed it to my sony walkman and forget about everything. Opm, pop, rap and rnb were my favorites, but I’d give everything a shot. As I got busier with my studies, and other activities, I had less time to record music. I still listened to the radio but skept the recording. At this point in time, I found the necessity of buying albums. Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford spending money on them.

I’m sure this is exactly why piracy is rampant. Downloading is effortless and cheap if not free. i understand what makes file sharing and piracy (I do not use these two terms synonymously) attractive to consumers. Mahal ang cd eh.. kahit 250-275 nalang ang opm. Mahal parin.
On the other side of things, one of the artists I grew up listening to… yano (or just dong abay now) is out of the business because no one bought his cds. This often makes me think how many great acts have vanished or how many talents do not get a break because of these activities. I mean as far as the new talents thing publishing or making things available on the net could go both ways, it could make or break them. But in the long run, I don’t think it would do them great in terms of their careers. Personally I don’t know a solution to this problem. I would say, maybe for the opm artists at least, taking the indy road could be a good thing.. maybe put up a website and sell records online so all the money goes to them except for taxes and stuff. But it could also be that no one would even know or hear or find out about them by taking this route.
*this is a reflection after reading lily allen’s blog about piracy http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=36707169&blogId=510114316