yes, I imagine that music has a huge and pertinent import for you, that doesn’t lessen what it means to someone else.

This is, as you say, the best bit. No matter how much meaning music has for you, me or anyone else, it doesn’t get used up so that there’s none there for the next person. It has been a most enjoyable debate actually – much appreciated indeed. And apologies for making Marcy’s head spin!

I will submit that you have some good points but this one is probably the achilles heel in your argument:

“Music simply means more to me and is more important to me than to the vast majority of people on this planet.”

Because it is subjective. Just what music “means” to you is a value judgment that you have placed on music. And while, yes, I imagine that music has a huge and pertinent import for you, that doesn’t lessen what it means to someone else.
And you know what? That’s okay. Because recorded music is an incredible thing. It’s ephemeral while at the same time longlasting. Nothing else exists like it. The way The Nutcracker can bring me back to my days as a toddler bouncing around my parent’s apartment. Or the way I feel when I put on my scratchy vinyl copy of “Kings of the Wild Frontier” by Adam Ant and I am transported back to college and listening to it, in it’s entirety, in bed with the first platonic girl friend I ever slept with, then finding out the news that Andy Kaufman had died. Or the tears that stream when I hear Pearl Jam’s “Black”, it being the song playing on the radio when my late daughter was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Or how Mika’s “Big Girls (You are beautiful)” makes me recognize a future memory I will have of me and my newborn daughter who dances to it while I hold her under her arms.

Music is freaking great.

Hey, if you wanna hear my band’s stuff, go to my personal website and click on Throttle Back Sparky. The songs are all there. They are on iTunes as well. Just to show you that I am, at the very least, a lover of music as well. http://www.allenlulu.com http://www.throttlebacksparky.com (But you can download ‘em at my site…shh, don’t tell anyone!)

Ciao!

Unclean!

In terms of ‘value’, fans have no intrinsic value of their own unlike, I would say, musicians who actually make stuff. Fans have a value to musicians in three basic ways I can think of off the top of my head:

There’s the emotional satisfaction of having someone connect with your music, and the dollar value of people paying for it (t-shirts, albums, gigs, whatever) and in both of these sense any sort of fan is pretty much equivalent. Except perhaps, the more someone loves your music, the happier you are as a band, but that doesn’t differentiate between the casual fan and the enthusiast.

The third way is in terms of providing advertising and momentum. I would say that casual fan is of more value in terms of momentum, whereas the enthusiast is of more value in terms of advertising. So a draw, pretty much.

The real difference in value or depth of love is more at the end of the fan, and largely irrelevant to the band or the world at large and is, as you say, entirely subjective. Music simply means more to me and is more important to me than to the vast majority of people on this planet. Equally, movies mean an awful lot more to movie buffs than they do to me and the vast majority of people on this planet.

And as to your mate who takes music without paying for it that is, from the looks of it, just plain wrong. He can offset his stealing by spreading word of mouth, but I don’t think that makes up for it.

But that is a whole other discussion!