Imagine walking into an art gallery and strolling past the paintings, admiring the keen sense of detail the artists incorporate. All of a sudden, you turn the corner and find yourself face-to-face with the most brilliantly colored, masterful piece of art you have ever seen. This piece of art connects with you on such a high level you realize you can't live without it - you must have it in your home, to be there any time you feel the need to connect with it again.
You realize the artist spent hundreds of dollars for the materials to create the piece. You also know the artist spent hours upon hours bickering within his or her own mind about miniscule details - whether a stroke of red in the upper right-hand corner will liven or kill the piece. You are certain this artist is just as passionate about the work as you are, if not more.
Unfortunately, you are a poor college student. So you walk over to the wall, take the piece off its stand and run out of the gallery.
Many of you are thinking, "I would never take a piece of art without paying for it. After all, if I respect the artist, I want to support him."
Unfortunately, thousands of college students do the equivalent of this on a daily basis - and feel absolutely no regret for it.
The only difference between artists of the canvas and artists of sound is the medium with which they create.
Music artists spend thousands of dollars on equipment, studio time, producers and everything else that goes into making music. They put their whole lives into their work to create music people can connect with.
But in the past few years a phenomenon has swept the nation, encouraging people of all ages to steal musicians' art - and what's worse, they feel no guilt for it.
It's known as downloading.
It started with Napster and Kazaa, which quickly had lawsuits brought against them from a number of recording studios and artists. Soon, these companies had to start charging people to download, but numerous other sites have popped up in their places.
BearShare, Morpheus, Blubster ... the list goes on and on. The question is: Can this piracy ever be stopped?
Album sales have dropped 21 percent since 2000. Apple's iTunes has encouraged people to actually pay for downloads, and as of last fall, iTunes became one of the 10 biggest music retailers in America. But even the popularity of iTunes has done little to soften the blow taken by recording artists over the past five years.
Think about it: For every 99-cent single someone downloads, that is most likely one $15 album that was not sold in a record store.
However, the people who are hurt most by this are not the record stores; it's not even the record labels. It is the artists.
Major-label artists see between five percent and 10 percent of the royalties of their albums - and only after a half-million copies have been sold. According to Downhill Battle, a nonprofit music activism Web site, Apple takes a 35 percent cut from each song sold on iTunes, leaving the record label with 65 percent. Out of that amount, most major-label recording artists end up with between 8 cents and 14 cents for each 99-cent song sold.
Even though iTunes is better than all-out piracy, downloading is killing the chance for musical artists to make a living off of their art.
The next time you go to download a song from your favorite band, think about if you are really supporting the artists or if you are hanging them out to dry.
But seriously folks ... thieves are bad people.
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