One likes to believe in the freedom of music

Recently I was talking about music with someone who had borrowed someone else's iPod and was making notes about what to download. She did not restrict the notes to songs, but to artists. 

It did not take much to discern that she would not be paying for the songs. 

Concerns about the legality and morality of file-sharing aside, I pondered having such an arrangement from another angle (that I do not get the impression is something those who engage in such things worry about): If one need not restrict one's input of songs based on monetary restrictions or based on what's available at a store, how would one know when to stop? Obviously there are issues of memory, but with hard drives as large as they come these days (and the ease of getting external ones to augment the storage capacity of the computer) that's not much of a hurdle to overcome. 

So if one has access to what is essentially an unlimited selection of music, without the restriction of what one can afford to spend, conceivably the only limitation one would have is the amount of time one has to devote to downloading. What reason would one have to refrain from simply downloading everything one thinks might be even of vague interest? 

What would be of concern to me in such a scenario: How could one listen to that much music? Certainly one could play that much music, by loading it on a portable device and putting it on while one went through one's day, but that wouldn't really be listening to it; that would be hearing it in the background while one conducted one's duties. One could devote a certain level of concentrated attention to some tracks, but not to the entirety of the collection. Much of the collected music would simply be collected for the sake of collecting it. 

Not that there is anything intrinsically awful about that. However, it is not so much fueled by liking music but by liking the acquisition of music, which is a different thing. 

To "listen" to a song once is, by and large, not enough times to get a true appreciation for it. Once may be enough to determine whether it is something that holds appeal for one's tastes or does not, but even that's not much of a test. However, to really get to know a song, to be able to sing along with it, to really get it inside of you, one needs to listen to it. Many, many times. But how is one to do that if one has more songs at one's disposal than one could realistically listen to unless one did nothing but listen to them without focusing on any other activity (including sleep)? 

~ 

My rumination on this amassing of downloaded music and the impossibility of listening to all of it to the point where one would have true familiarity with every single track seeks only to establish that: one has more than one can handle. I do not claim that there's anything wrong with having more than one can handle, however. 

Obviously the people who just download en masse in that manner have no issues with doing so nor with the challenge of actually listening to it all. The question was what would prevent one from downloading everything in the absence of outside circumstances (like running out of money) to stop it. 

I imagine the answer is that eventually the novelty wears off. The thrill of acquiring all those music files wanes. At some point the effort to maintain and track all those songs—especially if there's only a certain percentage one really likes—becomes… effort. 

It is entirely possible, however, that such people are simply way better at managing their time than am I. They may also have greater mental capacity for getting a feel for a song with only a listen or two. 

So all I was doing was explaining a question that was not asked, in a manner that ultimately was not that interesting. 

I kind of figured I'd springboard into why I bother to pay for a subscription to emusic (rather than just find out from these people who download how they do it), but that's not likely to be interesting either. 

(However, I will note that part of my reluctance to download from file-sharing sites is the feeling like I'd be obligated to, you know, share. And I'm not inclined toward that, which is why I don't mind paying a modest fee for what I get.) 

It's all about being fair to the music. Or something. (Sure, that ending sucked, but just wait until it's remixed.)