[sclitheroe]

I don't expect everyone, or anyone, to agree with me, but I wanted to share my thoughts on this as food for thought - maybe you feel the same, maybe you don't. Maybe you can afford to do this, maybe you can't. Maybe my approach is sound, maybe it has flaws.

2013 is the year I go legit.

At the end of 2012, I'm dragging around over 2 TB of movies I'll never watch again (Does anyone really want to commit two hours to sit and watch Chain Reaction a second time? Really? Why did I even download that in the first place?). I've got a music library that is over-expansive, to the point where I can't tell anymore if the albums I've downloaded are complete, un-corrupt, and tagged correctly, because I could listen to my library for 8 hours a day for 153 days and not hit a repeat. It would take me even longer than that to inspect and fix up the meta-data for every album - I could probably hire a high school student to do it for me part time, and they'd make out alright.

So right off the bat, what I've got now is a big sprawling mess - it's actually better than most people's libraries; it's not a jumbled directory of MP3's, but the overall size means even a 15% error rate on meta-data or the files themselves is close to 3000 bad tracks.

On top of that, my resources are limited. I can keep throwing disks at this beast, but I have to buy the disks. I have to keep the server up. I have to back the data up. In two different locations. So now I need a fat internet pipe to keep this stuff in the cloud too. My usage report at Shaw shows something like 1/2 to 3/4's of my monthly bandwidth usage is spent backing this stuff up to the cloud. All of this costs time and money. If I ever had to recover from the cloud, I don't know how well it would even work - pulling down individual files is easy, but I need to recover tens of thousands of them if my house burns down. And why am I even saving and protecting this stuff when 50% of it is unplayed, or played once never to be accessed again?

My time is limited - I have less free time for media consumption than I used to. I obtain stuff faster than I can invest the time to listen to it or watch it critically. I'm not even sure I can listen to an artist once as it flashes by on my hard drive and learn anything about them - but I have to keep going or the backlog doesn't shrink. Out of 18,000 tracks, 12,000 are still unplayed. I think by downloading less, I can concentrate on a quality experience rather than a quantity based one.

I'm an amateur musician. I think. Or maybe just a hobbiest guitar player, I'm not sure where the line is drawn. But I'm methodically practicing and learning every single day. And in the genre I'm studying, the blues, I listen to a lot of music as a learning tool. I'm listening to, and learning from, guys that are masters and who have invested thousands more hours in their craft than me. I think I owe them some compensation for this, because I'm standing on their shoulders. Blues musicians aren't exactly millionaires - there's a reason a lot of the greats are in their 70's and still touring. I feel like in some small way I might be in their circle, and that it's not right to be stealing from brothers and sisters.

I wonder about the economy. Yeah, I know artists mostly make their money touring. Yeah I know the cost of digital media duplication and distribution approaches zero. There's lots of questions about the media industry in the digital age and the value of artistic work. But what about the guy that runs the recording studio? Or the guy that builds the gear that goes in the studio? Or the guy that sweeps the floors of the plant of the guy that builds the gear that goes in the studio? I wonder deeply about the trickle down effect of the loss of thousandth's of a cent of income trickling down through the economy. Of my contribution to the infinitesimally small, but persistent and pervasive devaluation of the work these people perform.

So for these big reasons, and some smaller ones (setting an example for my kids, not exposing myself or my family to the however minor, but real risk of a lawsuit, morality of intellectual property theft, etc), I'm done. I'm going legit.

I've decided it'll play out like this:

- I culled my movie library by over 50%. Got rid of everything I'll never watch again. I kept stuff that the kids or wife would howl about me deleting - I will deal with that later, but I'm not imposing my decision on them right now, even though I'm technically the curator.

- I subscribed to Rdio. Now everything I listen to via Rdio is officially legit. I don't judge the contract Rdio signed with the labels, nor the contract the labels signed with the artists - it's out of scope for me personally, and isn't something I can change. Rdio is legit, ergo so am I.

- My music library is being culled. I'm removing everything I can identify as stuff I downloaded. I legitimately own probably 6000-7000 tracks out of my 18,000, so this won't be that hard. I can add the stuff I'm removing back into Rdio, so no big loss. If I find stuff that I downloaded, but can't find in Rdio, I'll either buy it in iTunes, or if it's unavailable, it'll stay for now. I doubt there's much that will fall into this category.

- For music I want to use in my guitar study (for example, slowing down tunes to look at licks, chord progressions, etc), or for jamming to, I'll buy them in iTunes. I need the physical files to run in my software, so this is how I'll get them. I debated allowing myself to download them, since I was paying via Rdio, but Rdio is a pay-per-play model, so that didn't work.

- For movies, if I'm watching it once, I'll rent it. It's highly unlikely for me to ever want to watch a movie a second time, so even if I'm renting the same movie twice in a two or three year span, I don't see the big deal. My kids tend to watch a given movie a dozen or more times - that works out to like $1-2 a play if I purchase them. I think I can afford that. And I think it will make me (and them) more discerning about what we choose to watch.

- For TV, I don't have a solution yet. I don't watch much TV, and the only two series that interest me or my wife are Dexter and Game of Thrones currently, and those are both idle right now, so I have time to find a solution.

Maybe this will work out great, or maybe I'll be off the wagon again in 6 months. We'll have to see. But I'm going to try.

So that's where I'm at. I don't even know why I'm sharing it, except that it's been on my mind a lot lately, and I wonder if there are other people thinking along the same lines, or that have insightful thoughts to the contrary. What say you?