[den]

I guess mine is shared by default. I'm not on soulseek very often. If you follow the "righteous" school of sharing music, then I think it's ok to share commercially available stuff, the idea being that one will download music to sample and then buy it later.

That's what I do in theory, but recently I realized that I haven't really put that into practice. You have to be honest with yourself: Once you download an album, and if you like it, how often do you go out and buy it later? Once you have the music, it's too easy to justify not buying the cd. You rationalize to yourself that you don't really like it so much that you want to pay for it. There's no definitive amount of "liking-ness" where you can determine if you will purchase the cd or not. After I realized this, I've been buying a lot more cds lately. But the problem still remains.

Most people say they download and then buy later, but no one does that 100% of the time. I'm sure everyone who shares music has downloaded something, kept it and not deleted it, and yet not purchased it. You have to be careful that you're not just saying you buy things later to feel good about yourself. That, or just have no qualms about stealing music.

Also, not saying that anyone does this, but it's silly to download albums from other bands, and share those, but keep Underworld separate. Why give special treatment to one band?

Besides, I never really see anyone downloading Underworld from me, so they must not be that good.