I know I’ve done it, and I also know there is a pretty good chance that you have down­loaded songs too.

In fact, I hon­estly can­not think of one sin­gle per­son that I am friends with who does not down­load songs from the inter­net. Even my Mom does it. Granted, just because my Mom does it, that does not exactly make it right.

Is down­load­ing music truly a wrong thing to do though? Should I feel guilty every time I tell a file-sharer to down­load the newest hit sin­gle? No, I do not believe I should.

Like many col­lege stu­dents, I never run into the dilemma of hav­ing too much money. So why would I be will­ing to spend $15-$20 on a CD with 15 songs and I only like two of them. Who is steal­ing from whom?

In a recent U.K. study, they found that 60 per­cent of peo­ple claimed to down­load music off a file-sharing web­site because of a lim­ited bud­get. With the econ­omy the way it is, peo­ple all across the world have had to keep their wal­lets in check where they may have spent friv­o­lously in the past. This being espe­cially true for col­lege students.

There really is no rea­son for me to go buy an infe­rior prod­uct just because I heard one song that I like on the radio. Instead of blam­ing file-sharing web­sites and the peo­ple using them, artists need to look in the mir­ror if they truly feel this is an issue.

I recently bought a CD, my first in for­ever it feels like. A friend of mine had pur­chased this par­tic­u­lar CD and I soon real­ized that this was actu­ally a good CD from front to back. This ulti­mately resulted in me giv­ing Eminem my money.

I guess I just have a really hard time feel­ing sorry for artists who are worth mil­lions and mil­lions of dol­lars. Half of them can­not even per­form with­out lip-syncing, or sound even remotely tal­ented with­out their voice being com­pletely changed by a DJ.

I hon­estly feel that the drop in CD sales is not due to peo­ple down­load­ing songs off the inter­net. It is the com­plete lack of qual­ity that the music artists of today have deemed accept­able for them­selves and their prod­uct of work.

For you artists who con­tinue to work hard and per­fect your works of art, I will be in a line at Best Buy with your prod­uct in hand. For the rest, I will be online with your prod­uct in que. n