Not exactly. The modern music story really begins a few years before Napster, when lumpy ol' 56k modems were cutting-edge and the FCC, under corporate pressure, loosened media ownership rules. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 allowed, among other things, the rise of radio-dominant corporations like Clear Channel and CBS, who saturated airwaves with focus-tested, mainstream-friendly moose drool on a wider scope than ever before. TV and print media, also victims of corporate consolidation, followed suit.

It's not a perfect corollary on paper: that the rise of corporate media in the '90s birthed the MP3 culture of today. But it's a story worth telling if we're to understand what it means to be a "pirate" today. When radio stopped delivering a legitimate "try-before-you-buy" exchange of music, and when our over-the-air DJs were stripped of the ability to surprise and delight us on an hourly basis, we did not respond by becoming thieves.

We responded by becoming DJs.

Perhaps more people would see the connection, if only music critics ever owned up to the fact that we're the biggest music pirates out there. I suppose I'll start first. Get this meeting moving.

Hi. My name is Sam, and I have been a music pirate for 12 years.

It all started in college, when I got hooked up with a job at a used CD store. The shop always had new albums in stock, thanks to radio reps who sold dozens of new discs a week; many weren't even in stores yet. They were stickered with "for promotional purposes only," always in the same golden, all-caps font with a warning about the record label demanding the disc's return at a moment's notice. We laughed the warnings off, listening to the albums in the store and sometimes enjoying our employee perk of borrowing used CDs five at a time.

Years later, I upgraded to a weekly newspaper. My boss, the paper's music editor, hated dealing with the massive crates of promotional CDs that arrived every few days, so she routinely asked me to sort them on her behalf. I didn't tell her about my addiction. I kept my cool and helped the best I could, alerting her to high-profile albums and local highlights. She gave me first dibs on a few album reviews for the section and let me keep anything she disliked (typically, anything loud or electronic).

Within a year, I took over the editorship, and I secured the promotional music drip. Every day, at least a dozen new albums found their way to my desk. I'd deal with the CD overload with a few parsing methods: ask coworkers to help me sort and listen, or reach out to our syndicate's music editors via e-mail for their opinions, or merely glance at the artist name and album cover for a gut reaction.

In all, I spent over six years getting records via such means before I began downloading in earnest.

Jorge Franganillo/Flickr

That's what a modern MP3 depository feels like: the desk of a newspaper's music section, or even the counter at a busy record store. You're buried in every new CD imaginable and connected to a network of friendly music geeks. The heft of such access intoxicates.