Let's be honest with each other for a second. We've all participated in illegal file-sharing. It's like masturbating. If you say you don't do it, you're either a complete fucking liar or you're one of those weird home schooled Children of the Corn type kids that wears homemade highwater pants and doesn't believe in hand-holding before marriage. Either way, no one is going to trust you.

So just admit it. You download free music. Whether you lie to yourself and say you only do it to preview tracks before you buy or you're just an unrepentant thief, you know your way around Soulseek. You might have even read up on some of the recent news in the file sharing world. You probably should. You never know when you're going to get visited by some G-Men with a record of all the Meatloaf albums you've purloined and a warrant for your incarceration. But you should probably also realize that although there has been a lot of recent debate about file-sharing, a lot of very fresh weeping and wailing about illegal downloading killing the Recording Industry, none of what you're hearing from Lily Allen or the RIAA is new. In fact, the Recording Industry has been almost hypochondriac in predicting its own demise for almost thirty years, since the early 1980's, when the cassette tape was king.

Blank cassette tapes were originally sold as a way to back-up a person's library of LPs. Of course, people immediately put two and two together and they began copying their friends' LPs and taping songs from the radio. Why wouldn't they? It was easy, affordable, and, unless you were born under the worst of all possible signs, there is almost no chance you would ever, ever get caught. The Recording Industry threw an understandable hissy fit, which led to the “Home Taping is Killing Music” campaign and the invention of the iconic Tape and Crossbones logo.

The campaign produced a number of offshoot parodies and counter-campaigns. In their infinite wisdom, the Record Industry somehow didn't think that a really cool image that combined the DIY aesthetic of the cassette tape with the symbol of piracy that is the Jolly Roger could ever be appropriated by the very musical pirates that they were trying to stop. Zines started using the slogan “Home Taping is Killing the Music Industry,” with the words “So Be Sure to Do Your Part” below the logo. Rocket From the Crypt, Billy Bragg, and Black Metal godfathers Venom all adopted similar variations for their merchandise. The Dead Kennedys went so far as to release their In God We Trust, Inc EP with one side blank, so fans could help destroy the Recording Industry's profit margins. Later on, Jello Biafra would tell a rapt audience of thirty-three gray-mohawked fanboys that his measures actually constituted the death knell of the RIAA as well as all Republicans, King Koopa, and a couple of very surly Wampas.

Many asserted that the cassette tape could only help the Industry, specifically by spreading new music around where radio and press could or would not. By creating mixtapes, friends could introduce each other to new artists, thereby increasing sales. The cassette tape also provided a forum for unsigned acts who previously had none. The affordability of both cassettes and four and eight-track Portastudios made it easy for unknown acts to distribute their music independently of the major labels. The Portastudio even gained some major artistic credibility in 1982, when Bruce Springsteen recorded his highly-regarded album “Nebraska” entirely on four-track.

Some of the Major Labels, knowing they would not be able to stem tide of cassette tape use, opted to join in. Island Records, for a brief period, began selling chromium dioxide tapes which were prerecorded on one side and blank on the other – a “One Plus One”. However, most of the Record Industry continued to bellyache and grouse about blank cassettes killing their business. In the UK, CBS Records attempted to sue Amstrad, a British Electronics Company for producing a medium that could potentially undermine the recording business. The House of Lords found in favor of Amstrad, ruling that manufacturing cassette decks in no way constituted copyright-infringement. Despite the continuing protests and propaganda of the Record Industry, people kept on using blank cassettes the way the Good Lord intended, with no discernible effect on the profit margins of the Major Labels. It would seem logical that if the Record Industry could survive the plague of home dubbing, then they could kick up their proverbial heels, basking in the knowledge that no medium could ever siphon away the flow of their profits. Right?

Wrong. Flash forward to the mid-nineties and the invention of the MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3. At first the MP3, developed by scientists working for the Fraunhofer Society, was merely a means by which nerds could trade Monty Python tunes over IRC. However, the MP3 made leaps and bounds into public use in 1997 when Nullsoft released the Winamp, a media player designed specifically to use MP3s.

Shortly thereafter, sites started popping up designed for the trading of MP3 files. The Powers That Be, including the RIAA, the World Intellectual Property Organization, and the United States Senate started bandying about phrases like “digital rights management”. In October 1998, President Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act into full-on law. This did not, however, stop file-sharing sites from popping up. Within one month of the DMCA's creation, Audiogalaxy.com appeared on the World Wide Web, offering peer-to-peer downloads. Within a year, Napster was launched.

In way, Napster was the Alpha and the Omega of file-sharing, the birth of the MP3 boom and the initial site of the file-sharing war. Most of us who are old enough to remember Lars Ulrich as a human being and not a despicable, money-grubbing lizard man, downloaded our very first MP3s off Napster. The MP3 proved similar to the cassette tape in its positive attributes – downloading MP3s was a great way to find new bands, and for unsigned acts to worm their way into ear canals all over the world. Other sites and softwares cropped up, with equally crazy-ass names like Gnutella and eDonkey2000, but Napster remained the undisputed King. Hell, Napster was even given partial credit for driving Kid A to the top of the Billboard Charts.

But there were a few big differences between MP3s and cassettes which the RIAA found off-putting. For starters, the fact that MP3s were exchanged over the Internet meant that you could find someone with anything you wanted. No longer did a music pirate have to wait until someone he knew bought that new record off which he could successfully leech. Now, with MP3s, all one had to do was enter a file-sharing chat room and type “Hey, who has 'Voices' by Hall and Oates? Anyone?”. Furthermore, unlike a dubbed cassette tape, MP3's audio quality, unless you are a unrepentant snob with an overdeveloped tympanic membrane, was of high enough quality to potentially throw purchasing CDs completely out of the equation. And with CD-Rs available to make these pilfered tracks listenable on the ol' home stereo, this spelled serious trouble for the Record Industry.

You're probably familiar with the what happened next. Lars Ulrich, under direction from A&M Records, puts on a barrel and suspenders and pretends in a court of law that Metallica has lost their vast fortune at the hands of dorm-dwelling vultures who don't pay for MP3s. Napster is forced to hand over 20 million in damages to various record companies. It became a pay site. Almost nobody you know uses it.

But the successful suit against Napster wasn't the skull-crushing blow to file-sharing that the Record Industry had hoped it would be. It did provide precedent for the shutdown of The Pirate Bay, the multi-million dollar lawsuits against single moms for downloading a couple Sheryl Crow singles, and, perhaps worst of all, the spawn of Lily Allen's Internet rants about how terribly poor she is. But new sites for file-sharing are popping up all the time and every day new Pirates of the Internet are born. Record companies are continually sending out pity party press releases about how terrible file-sharing has been for their industry. And while it is fair and just that we pay for the music we enjoy, remember that the kind of rhetoric we see against illegal file-sharing has been going on for thirty years in some form or another – thirty years in which very little has changed. In fact, from where we see it, record execs are still rich, rappers still pretend to be rich, most bands still have to rely on tickets and t-shirts to make their nut and major label popsters like Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake can still afford to mince around town like the mid-level demigods they are. Artists that are good enough to warrant financial support from their fans will survive, artists that aren't won't. And in five to ten years MP3s will clear the way for whatever the new technology is that is already killing music before it's even been invented. And the Record Industry will start noticeably hacking and coughing once more.