Friday of next week, a Boston band called The Campaign For Real-Time will be playing a show at the Middle East, which I would like to go to (I may be otherwise engaged, but for the purposes of this quandry, let's assume I'm going). A while back, I downloaded one of their songs from the Boston Phoenix website, and subsequently downloaded their whole album via BitTorrent. It was good, but not great -- enough so that I'd want to see them, but probably not enough so that I'd want to buy it, particularly in a world where I check out tons and tons of new records.

However, I saw a copy of the album in a used record shop yesterday for $3 and thought about buying it. While I didn't like it enough to pay, say, $12 or whatever the retail price might be, I did like it a quarter of that much. But if I pay $3 to this used record store, the band gets nothing, which sort of defeats the moral purpose of upgrading my unauthorized download to a "legitimate" CD. So would it make more sense to go to the show and pay (probably) $10 directly to the band for a new copy of the CD, thereby fulfilling the moral aspect of supporting the band (which I care about) as well as the legal aspect of owning the CD (which I don't), even though I'm apparently paying three times what I think the album is worth to me? I suspect the better choice on the merits is buying it from the band.

But.

This leads me to actually feel generally supported in my usual method of downloading records and going to a lot of live shows, the reason being that if supporting the band is really the point, going to shows is a better, more direct way of doing it than buying records in most cases (with the exceptions being sometimes that buying records from merch tables gets more money into the band's hands, and that self-released albums don't involve shady record industry people). But in the case of records that are just good -- the band's worth seeing live, but the record's not worth paying $10-15 for -- there's more moral worth in paying a cover than in giving them maybe 10-15% of the cost of the CD.