My editorial letter in defense of mp3s

The RIAA’s recent and upcoming spate of lawsuits against those who share mp3s is like the snake eating itself, but instead of starting at the tail, this particular snake is going after a much more significant and vital part of its body. People who make mp3s available for download are more or less offering free advertising for various artists, exposing them to an audience wider than ever before in the history of recorded music.
This act is not piracy. I consider myself a music consumer, and as such, the CD still has tremendous value to me. The mp3, while integral to my identity as a consumer, has less of the CD’s permanent appeal because of two important reasons.
First, the encoding of typical mp3, between 128 and 192 kbps, fails to approach CD quality music. Mpeg layer-3 compressed files make music easy to transfer by reducing the amount of data in the file, inevitably degrading the quality of the mp3.
Second, the mp3 lacks album artwork, which is another creative outlet that CDs offer. It provides a dimension of visuality and tactility entirely missing from a digital assemblage of ones and zeros.
What does the mp3 mean to me then?
I view it as a preview medium allowing me to more often be an informed buyer. The current setup where only a handful of singles are shared on the radio (effectively hiding the remainder of the album from potential consumers) is implicitly unfair, not to mention deceptive, to the buyer. The mp3, then, levels the playing field, minimizing the number of purchases based only on hype and not on substance. Even in this case, it isn’t perfect at preventing me from buying CDs that I ultimately dislike enough to sell (evidenced by the number of times I frequent the local used shop), the reason for which is the excitement and anticipation of buying.
Furthermore, the rate at which I buy CDs since the advent of file sharing programs has at least doubled. Along with online word of mouth, mp3s have replaced and exceeded the radio as my source of new or previously unheard music. After all, the radio is less responsive to my requests while online technology is closer to being genuinely on-demand. In a way, mp3s offer in future purchases something similar to royalties paid by radio stations.
In any case, I imagine that most mp3s involve an initial purchase of the CD – how is that different from borrowing from a lending library or a friend, or buying it used (where money goes exclusively to the store)?
Because there are people like me out there actively sharing music, the RIAA’s wholesale persecution is myopic, irresponsible, paranoid, and ultimately self-destructive.