When napster first hit the news a years back, I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and downloaded feckloads of stuff. To be fair, it wasnt ever really dance music though, more like if there was some band that only ever did one good tune and I couldent be asked to buy the whole album I'd just download that one tune.

And I used to have no doubt thousands of pounds worth of cracked software as well.

But I slowly felt more and more guilty about it, and eventually decided to be honest about it all, and not rip people off (it helps that I have more money now than I did then).

So now I dont. I am admittedly using a ripped off copy of Reason 3, but I will pay for it, I only got a copy of Reason 2.5 6 months ago or something (and thats a bought copy) and now that I know Reason 3 is worth a few more bucks I'll dish it out when I can.

As for MP3's, I am still on soulseek, and I do use it, but primarily to download mixes, which I dont have any moral/ethical issues with. I also download the occasional track to check it out, but if I like it, I'll buy the real thing. If I dont like it, although it may still live on my hard drive, I dont listen to it, and so dont really feel guilty about having downloaded it. Every so often stuff like this gets rounded up and deleted anyway.

As for playing out with tunes that I've downloaded, well, I have played a few old funk tracks and that sort of thing, but they are impossible to find on any format, and the artists who did them may well be dead anyway, so I dont get bothered about that, but thats about it.

Downloading and playing out new tunes is unforgiveable if you ask me. If someone slipped in a classic or two that are impossible to get on vinyl I could probably forgive them, but not if its something that could easily be bought in the local record shop.