09.15.09
Behold the power of Capitalism!
I know it’s trendy to be all “omg those dirty greedy capitalists” these days, but I gotta say, I love it. Not that I’ve ever particularly been in doubt, but this was just brought home to me last night as I looked for sheet music for a piece I’m considering for this semester’s recital. Since there are apparently no sheet music stores in this half of the state, the intarweb is my sheet music resource, and that’s been kind of rough in the past: not very many years ago, my best hope of finding music on the intarweb was if by some chance someone had scanned in the pages in image format. They would be terrible quality, large files, really hard to find, and even harder to legitimately purchase if I wanted to be all legal and stuff. If I *could* manage to find it to purchase, it meant paying a shipping fee and waiting some two weeks before I actually had the music in my hands.
Now, a 2-minute search gets me professionally-prepared sheet music, instantly transposed into whatever key I want, downloaded to my computer so I can print it right away, for a couple bucks. Oh, and if I want an accompaniment track to go with it?I can burn that onto a CD in minutes for only a few dollars more.
I can think of about eighteen billion ways in which capitalism makes my life better, and not a single way in which I or anybody else is worse off for it. Why exactly do we need the government getting in the way of it again?