My 6 year old daughter has a new idol – the British pop phenom Mika and his hit song Lollipop. She watches it over and over on YouTube, and seems like she can never get enough of it. Yesterday I told her “I see that you really like this song. I’ll go ahead and buy you the album”. Her reply puzzled me – “but why, dad, we already have it!” I wasn’t sure what she means, so I said “no, I didn’t buy it yet” to which I replied “but we already have it on YouTube, daddy.”
Ahh, got it.
It never occurred to her that music has to be purchased. And really, why bother when it’s all available online? I guess either we or YouTube or both break some law by playing over and over, but than again maybe not. Since bandwidth is basically free and sites like Pandora and Last.fm stream the music I like, there’s no real reason to buy music anymore except for maybe to help some starving artists.
The interesting part is that I knew all that for a while now, but needed my 6 year old daughter to help me connect the dots…