quick survey ... what proportion of your CD collection is "pirated"?

the effect of file sharing for me is not that pirates will overtake bought, but that the whole amount will shrink. the "i wonder what thats like" purchases have now stopped. ive spent too much money on cds this way. now i download, find out what somethings like. more than 80% of my downloads are headed for the recycle bin. and i will now only buy cds i KNOW i will like a lot

Actually, how is this different?

the proportion will remain similar

the amount kept will be less

most of my mp3s i get rid of after 2 days because i dont like them

I don't hold with burnt CDs.

If I really like something I'll probably buy it even if I've got a burned copy. Same with tapes.

In this context is it 'burned' or 'burnt'? 'Burned' sounds more right even though it's probably wrong.

For the record, when I really love an album (which is often), I'll go out and buy it or order it online. So my actual store-purchased CDs are easily growing now at a faster rate than ever before, even if it still has nothing on the rate at which I trade and burn CDs. I justify it by telling myself that it's my duty as an editor to be as informed as possible, but really it's pure greed.

Actually, mp3 and CD-burning made me even more CD-phobe than before. I became the kind of person who doesn't want to buy an album only relased on CD. I'd rather spend days and weeks on soulseek to find it for free and burn it on a cd-r, without a booklet or other shit like that. I think the small size of a CD and its industrial, cold plastic packaging makes him perfect for a copy, with the name and title hand-written on the disc, but is definitely not compatible with the idea of a properly manufactured original album. Vinyl should be the only "official" format to release music.

I'd like to count the mix CDs.

I'd say I have around 480 original CDs and about 120 home burned ones.

So about a 6th of the music I possess on CD is pirate

Let's rephrase that with better maths shall we ...

So about a 5th of the music I possess on CD is pirate

I just yesterday got a CDR of Boards of Canada's Twoism -- i don't know if the guy who burnt it's a hack, but i've only found one disc player that'll spin it (not that it's so great, either).

Maybe my moral high ground is just draining my wallet, but i think the artists deserve their little chunk of royalty from my purchase.

I've only made a couple from downloading, mostly because they just are not available like Shellac's "Futurist" (paired with some 7"s I couldn't find), a cd of odd Tortoise tracks I couldn't get, and some Richie Hawtin remixes which are not out on CD. I'd probably purchase them if they were compiled and released, as these are MP3s made off of vinyl releases, so the quality really varies.

I made these a couple of years back when the Napster thing was just getting going and haven't even really looked for anything as such for well over a year or so. I'm on a dial up and don't really have the time or interest to track down more things via the web.

I've got around 300 lps and a box of 7"s, but none are boots as far as I know.

A couple of my krautrock Cds, like the Neu! and maybe a couple of others are of possible questionable origin, as they are oddball imports.

m.

I expect the proportion to remain pretty constant.

I buy a hell of a lot more CDs than most people I know (not counting ILMers)

but I do have three and a half thousand mp3s.

But I still have just under 1000 records, normal CDs and tapes, and I still buy albums for real so I doubt I'll ever have more "pirated" material than legit.

Um, unless you count promos and used stuff...I wouldn't be surprised if only half of my purchases resulted in royalties for the artist.

Have about 75 x C90's worth of old stuff taped from radio though, or of CD's/albums that ppl copied for me - or selected tracks from ones I've borrowed from them.
(Have recently started using minidisc for this latter function - now have about 15 x 160 mins worth of this format.)

If I like most of the tracks on an album I've copied I will buy it eventually - although I do prefer to get it 2nd hand in that case - why bother paying full price when I've already got the music?
(& can anyone tell me what the structure/dissemination of money is in that 'resale' sphere ? Once a CD has been bought once at a major store that does the stock returns and sales figures for it - it does drop off the industry's radar, right?)

If I actually had CD-R facilities, broadband access, and the understanding of how to do all this downloading & MP3 malarky I'd be getting in there while the going's good. I'm anxious about buying anything on spec these days - and every now and then you find works that either pale after a few listens or that take a while to grow on you.

I'm pretty un-concerned about depriving the music industry of my £ - apart from some ingrained resentments and attitudes I need to question (concerning perceived (maybe just image bluster)wastage/decadence going on at certain levels, and daft prejudices about the extent to which it's all a 'proper job' anyway haha), I bet the big corps who own the labels also make money from blank media anyway, and the music industry should be shifting to a more song-based structure for purchasing, instead of trying to maintain their mark-up margin on formats alot of us don't want. It's not as if most albums are prog-rock symphonic extravaganzas - majority of pop/rock stuff is a chain of individual short-stories, not some vast thematic narrative....

(Off to count my CDs)

However, I do buy old records all the time. They're cheap, fun to own, and won't go out of style (vinyl is classic, baby).