I am missing one major qualification for my column. For seven years, I downloaded no music. When I resumed, it was only to download legally recorded and shared concert recordings. This puts me horribly out of step with music listeners of my age or younger (I’m 28). I don’t have the money or resources to do any scientific polling, but from my informal conversations with friends, it looks like four out of five people get most of their music through various free –and therefore illegal— downloading resources. Virtually no one I know still purchases CDs regularly, and those that purchase CDs and records still manage to acquire a substantial amount of their music online. A few months ago, I decided that it was time for me to get with the times and find out what the illegal music downloading scene was like.

I stopped downloading copyrighted music when Audiogalaxy stopped offering free music way back in July 2002. Audiogalaxy, you may remember (or not - I don’t think it is as well remembered as Napster) was the free file-sharing service that filled the void left by Napster when it was shut down in the summer of 2001. I quit downloading music when no easy alternative presented itself to me. Also, as I became more concerned with sound quality, MP3s lost their appeal. To me, downloading music was merely a means to discover and sample new music. Today, few people take such a limited view of music downloads. For the majority of the people I know, the internet has become their primary means of acquiring new music.

Half of the reason I quit downloading music was because it seemed like too much trouble. This is embarrassing to admit after examining the available services and finding that they are all incredibly easy to use. In fact, just about every available filesharing service and website is easier to use than Napster and Audiogalaxy ever were. However, downloading free/illegal music files today is more challenging than it was previously in one respect: the proliferation of options. When I was a college freshman, everyone used Napster. Today, I have trouble finding two people who download music the same way. Not only does it seem like everyone is using a different service (something which is clearly impossible since the success of file-sharing requires a large user pool), but the available options are sometimes radically different in how they operate.

I’m honestly somewhat surprised and perplexed with the persistence of centralized peer-to-peer (cP2P networks. The Recording Industry was extremely effective in using the courts to shut down first Napster, then Audiogalaxy and later Grokster in 2004. More recently, Limewire has been the target of litigation, and appears headed for crippling court decisions. Nevertheless, it still appears to be up and running; Ares, another centralized peer-to-peer network, appears ready to fill the void. I honestly have no idea how Soulseek has managed to stick around for a decade. cP2P filesharing appears to be kicking as strong as ever. As soon as one shuts down, another one rises to fill the void (I’ll examine this phenomenon in the next iteration of this column).

Nevertheless, centralized peer-to-peer file-sharing is the way of the past. Torrents look like a much more palatable alternative to the inherent risks and frustrations of cP2P networks (i.e. viruses, canceled downloads, vulnerability to litigation). While a centralized peer-to-peer network requires you to download an entire file from a single user, torrents allow you to download the same file from several users at once. I’m ashamed to say that for several years I thought torrents were too complicated for me. What a surprise it was when I found out that all I had to do to use them was to download a torrent client (uTorrent), install it and find a tracker to download from. Dimeadozen, the concert taping site that has already been covered in this column is a torrent site. Because of their dispersed approach, torrents potentially avoid many of the frustrations that cP2P file-sharing cause by spreading the costs and risks of downloading and uploading among the users.

As a good portion of you know, the most famous/infamous torrent site is The Pirate Bay. Already subject to numerous lawsuits, The Pirate Bay has proven itself extremely resilient. The servers are hosted overseas where U.S. authorities have been unable to reach, and the site managers appear to consider the spread of copyrighted content a mission. Another popular site I’ve found is Torrentz.com which is actually a search engine that indexes the content of a number of other torrent sites.

From what I have seen (which I will admit is limited), the torrent protocol is more capable of easily delivering large, hi-quality files than any other file sharing method. A torrent website can potentially screen and disable bad torrent files (viruses, poor quality rips) and ensure that only the highest quality content is uploaded. A perfect example of this could be found at the now-defunct (but since replaced) Oink.cd. In the two year’s since Oink’s shutdown, other private torrenting communities shave risen to provide even more content than their predecessors. These days, lossless music (typically in FLAC) is highly available, and digitally-scanned cover art is nearly ubiquitous in these communities.

I have not even come close to covering all the resources available for those seeking free music Two that I discovered but am ignoring this week are Youtube –apparently you can download the videos of songs and transfer them to MP3 files (albeit in a lower quality than is generally preferred) —and Easynews, a search engine of Usenet newsgroups that I may take some time to discuss in the future. It suffices to say that there are a lot of options out there; thus, if your favorite website goes the way of the dinosaurs tomorrow, there are alternatives.

But more important than the wealth of options is the quality. Downloading music is no longer the frustrating task of piecing an album together one MP3 at a time. In fact, many of these free (illegal) options are much easier to use and have more available content than iTunes and Amazon. For instance, if I want The Mekons first album, The Quality of Mercy is Not Strnen, which has been out of print since 1990, I can’t get it from iTunes or Amazon. So if I want to avoid paying in excess of $50 for a used copy, my best hope is downloading it illegally somewhere (for what it’s worth, I purchased my copy for $40 off eBay five years ago). And if I want lossless downloads of ANYTHING, there are almost no legal options (besides downloading directly from some independent artist’s web stores). Leaving the costs aside, legal downloading options still don’t match the illegal options in terms of ease of use, quality of files and available material. When it comes down to it, if a billion-dollar corporation like Apple can’t put together an online music store that matches the efforts of some music and computer nerds working for free, then I think we’re still a long way from seeing the death of free music on the internet.