I’ll be the first to admit that I may just be making excuses for my inconsistent morality. But I also believe art should be accessible to everyone — not just the few who can afford to have a satisfying and diverse record collection.

Ironically, unlike music downloading, I tend to feel a deeper sense of regret when it comes to actually purchasing music — mostly because I’ve wasted money on total crap.

Think about all the CDs you bought in your early teen years. I, for one, made some seriously lackluster purchases with my very slight disposable income (read: allowance).

There were so many factors that went into what albums I eventually purchased — namely, what the store was actually carrying (especially if it was a used record store), what was on sale or what I could remember I even wanted as soon as I started wandering the aisles. As a result, I’d often make impulsive choices I rarely listened to.

Picture this frequent spectacle: me, 13 years old, discovering punk rock for the first time, wandering through the used section of Tower Records while collecting a giant stack of CDs to sort through later, overwhelmed, having just sold back my old pre-teen pop CDs from childhood so I could buy new, less embarrassing albums, eventually settling on whichever record struck the right balance of affordability and desirability. The result: some terrible decisions (The Offspring) and some life-changing ones (The Strokes).

All my friends bought CDs in the same hit-or-miss way, and they’d burn them for me or (later on) let me upload them to my own iTunes, allowing me to slowly formulate a sizable but random music collection.

But, as we all know, downloading music for free has become a lot easier in recent years, making it possible for music collections to grow without the stress of spending money. Now, thanks to the Internet, being a musical connoisseur is no longer a luxury. It’s equally easy to cultivate a taste for the highbrow and a taste for the lowbrow, since downloading music from Thelonious Monk is no different from downloading Rihanna. It’s also easier to take risks on artists, because there’s no cost apart from the time it takes you to download an album, listen to it and then promptly discard it to your desktop trash bin.

Unfortunately, it looks like times will be changing yet again. Since file-sharing website Megaupload was taken down on piracy allegations (obviously, all true), finding links to albums on similar sites like Mediafire is growing increasingly difficult. Coupled with the recent threat of SOPA and PIPA in Congress, it’s hardly unreasonable to anticipate a future in which people are forced to pay for music again.

Let us put aside the important fact that this is a severe knock to Internet freedom and instead focus on what this could mean for us as simple appreciators of music.

There’s a certain honorable nostalgia in the old way of consuming music. Plus, I’m now older, wiser and less impressed by men with mohawks, so going to a record store might be a less haphazard experience than it was when I was a kid. I could, foreseeably, give my vinyl collection a fighting shot and take to buying records again. But ripping albums from my USB record player to my computer is a tedious process, and I enjoy the new musical landscape in which my collection can fit in my pocket and follow me everywhere.

This same logic also eliminates the possibility of fully relying on programs like Spotify as well, though I could upgrade to a Spotify Premium account or turn to the iTunes store if I was serious about keeping my iPod up to date.

But such costly solutions ignore the root of the problem: Music-listening is really better when it’s free. We may not have as communal of music experiences anymore, no longer holding burning sessions with friends or sitting around the record player together. Instead, we have far more personal music experiences, given that we can alter our collections as we please — not as the record store’s stock or your finances please.

The sheer act of downloading music already limits access for many people in the world — for one, you need a computer with Internet access before you can even consider downloading anything. So without the incredible resource of file-sharing at all, many more would have their capacity for experiencing great art severely limited, and that’s certainly something to fight for.