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I briefly touched on this with John on the Obie TRice thread, but I'll repost it here also.

First off, Software.
I'm about 50/50 with software, most games, I make sure I go out and buy them, but if its a graphic utility i.e, photoshop, that is priced at $400.00 + I gotta tell you, I'm gonna do the quick downlaod and get it installed. This is in part by the fact that I really couldn't afford half of the software that I use for graphic design. If i could afford it, I might buy it, for example, I could easy shell out for a program that costs like 40-100 bucks, but anything that is too marked up, I'd have to go for the d/l. It's just that these days it's just too easy to get ANYTHING you want for nothing, I wouldn't want to take away from the people who created the programs, but I'm danmn sure, they all got paid.

This is some of my thoughts on music downloads, taken from the Obie TRice thread:
A little about the downloading of music,

I just finished downloading the new Obie Trice album, yes I just downloaded it. I’m not against downloading the music, I don’t go overboard and download hundreds of songs, and I don’t spread what I download. I got to tell you that I will never buy an album unless I know for sure that it is good, I mean I hate albums that have one good single and the rest of the album just bites. If that’s the case the song will end up in my winamp’s play list, and that’s it. If it’s an album that just rocks, I might go out and shell out the cash, but that hasn’t happened in quite a few months. I hate the musicians who are putting pressure on everyone to start prosecuting people for downloading music, I don’t feel like it hurts these people at all. I guarantee that every artist that I have ever downloaded has a nicer house and bigger bank account than I do. What about the poor kids who can’t afford to buy albums, wouldn’t you rather these kids spreading your music instead of not getting a chance to listen to it, and become fans. These are the kids MORE likely to go to the shows, but a t-shirt, and help fatten the artist’s wallets. When I was growing up, I damn sure didn’t have the money to be able to listen and be exposed to all the music that I wanted to, if I wanted a certain album I had to shell out the 15-20 bucks to buy the cd, or cassette. Now kids have the opportunity to be able to listen to all the music that they want to, music that may inspire these kids to be musicians themselves. So the record industry sales has slipped 30% over the last year, so some fat cat in some high rise office, didn’t make that extra few million this year. I will be shedding tons of years for them tonight. If I was an artist I’d make all my music available for free, and I guarantee you’d have a bigger, more devoted audience. Isn’t art supposed to be about the art and not about the money? Just seems to me that these people care more about the all mighty dollar than they do about the fans who support them.

But I must say that the new Obie Trice album rocks the diso-tech, the tracks are slammin’ and the beats are hot, definitely check it out if you have a chance. Dr. Dre has worked magic on these beats, he makes it sound like the old west coast sound that dre has perfected over the years. Fucking classic album.


miKe