The MP3 bug has bitten America. From the cheap shots that Lars Ulrich took at  Napster on the MTV awards, to the never-ending Senate hearings on "sharing"  music files, and of course, the day when hell froze over and a Review editor denounced the use of MP3s, it is obvious that these little 5-meg files have become crux of America’s technological-ethical dilemma.

So people accept that we are in a technological revolution. But what good is coming to that conclusion if one falls short of accepting all the changes that come with that revolution? The mp3-haters of the world have recycled arguments since the first beta release of WinAmp. Would you walk into Best Buy and steal a CD? Isn’t it just like theft? You’re not paying for that Wyclef Jean song, are you, if you download it? But unlike these computer-users, the RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America, seems to care more about the royalties they are not making rather than how moral file-sharing is.

So they try to bully you into believing that since the music is "free," then it must be tantamount to stealing – robbing artists like N*Sync from the pennies they earn on each CD that sells. I would like to suggest that this argument is not only silly, but completely fallacious. Let me tell you, MP3s are not "free" by any means.
Consider for example, the means to which MP3s are downloaded. Since I caught wind of the word "Napster," my wallet has taken a serious beating. $20 a month bought me the connection to Download.com’s website, where my clicking on one of their banners earned them a few cents. But soon I had more songs than I knew what to do with, so Western Digital made $120 off me when I bought a bigger hard drive. And, of course, who can stand to download at 3 megs a second? Add another $50 a month for cable modem services from MediaOne. Now what about playing all those songs in my car? I forked over another $150 to Hewlett Packard for a CD-RW and another $100 for countless 10-packs of blank CDs, 3 of which don’t work in each pack. So when all was said and done, I had finally burned my first CD. But did it stop there? Of course not. Bigger and better is the American way! Add another $50 for Turtle Montego’s killer sound card and another $100 for surround sound speakers and a subwoofer capable of leveling a small Michigan town.

All these things make money for people. I spent more money "making" 4 CDs or putting my entire CD collection on my hard drive than just buying CDs from Tower. I am paying for every single one of those songs—only not to Columbia, Arista, or Virgin records.

So just because the recording music industry isn’t making money does not at all mean that somebody isn’t making money somewhere along the mp3-process. It is like carrier pigeon-trainers saying that telephones shouldn’t be legal because the carrier-pigeon-training industry would go out of business if they were.
The truth is we are in a complete revolution that will change the way people think, act, do business, and most importantly, make money. Rather than crying around about the evils of Napster and file sharing, the groups represented by the RIAA must be creative enough to find new strategies to deal with new technological advances. Not every milestone has been good for every business or association – typewriters, vinyl albums, and Beta VCRs have all gone the way of the carrier pigeon. If the music industry intends to keep its pockets well lined, then it must either innovate or vegetate.