In her days teaching college, someone very close to me related how a class discussion on ethics went specifically to whether or not downloading music without paying for it was right or wrong.

The students were unanimous—there was nothing wrong, unethical or immoral with downloading music without paying for it. “Music and art is for everyone—it should be free” was the prevailing argument. (Go grab a Monet, Rembrandt or DaVinci from a gallery and lemme know how the police respond to such an argument….but I digress.)

As part of the relaunch of our Salem Hill website (and welcome, btw!), I undertook a daunting task: Converting our entire catalogue to higher quality mp3s. And because I hate the idea of compressing, resampling, and the other nasty witchery that my wonderful original tracks have to go through to become mp3s, I also committed to remastering them. Every. Track. The following is not for the pathetic pirates who steal our stuff and plaster it on the internet for free. They’re pieces of garbage without the capacity to know right from wrong. But for the rest of you–those of you who like the convenience of mp3s/streaming data (and let’s face it, who doesn’t?), I offer the following.

Each Salem Hill song takes from a week to 6 months to write. It takes another 10 hours or so to properly arrange. It takes about a month to 90 days for all four of us to record our parts. It takes us another 10 hours or so to mix the song. It takes at least another 3 to 5 hours to master the song. It then takes several thousand dollars to get it to the public.

I leave it to you to decide whether grabbing it without paying for it is right or wrong.