Mpfreemium

I'm not a taker when the concept of 'freemium' is brought up. I understand it, of course, as a much needed resolution to the concerns of digital rights and intellectual property of content made available on the Internet, but in all honesty, the thought of paying for everything just bums me out.

I realise that I've probably just highlighted the biggest problem that the net generation suffer from- a really, really unhealthy sense of entitlement. From music, to images and photographs to ideas, if it's available somewhere on the Internet, it goes without saying that someone is going to take advantage of it costing them nothing other than bandwidth.

I should say first that as an avid music downloader, a lot of what I get is totally legal; most progressive record labels and artists are working with the times and offer free downloads as tasters of what's to come from them, but it's a matter of knowing where to look. Commercial artists are less likely to do this, as they can afford taking the risk of their music being shared online, as their CDs will still always be sold.

But as I sit here, eating the KitKat my stepbrother left in the fridge a few days ago, it has occurred to me that paying for Internet content would make me less likely to try new things. I don't like wafer at all, but it was sitting in the fridge, it was cookies-and-cream flavour, I was hungry, and I know he's not around for the next few days. I wasn't going to walk all the way to the dairy to try something that's been forgotten and left to rot. It's sort of the same with downloading music; a blog might describe a song really well, and though it's not by an artist I like or even particularly know of, I will probably download the song. For example, when my favourite music blog wrote about The-Dream's track Make Up Bag in their Stuck on Repeat feature they made it sound so tempting to be a The-Dream fan that I saved the track, and bought the album it's from when it was released a few months back (which is Love King- not as solid as his other albums, but a must-have for the grind-and-click R&B fans out there).

I realise that I won't be able to use ye olde 'poor student' excuse to justify my rabid mpfree diet forever, but if everything is soon to come down to freemium, and being an Arts student I'm bound to never having any money and a bad credit rating, how will I ever find other artists who know the exact right moment to drop the bass?