This website has been here since the mid-90s, for various purposes. Today, it's being used to house information and artwork I've created related to the band Journey.
I highly recommend that fans buy whatever is commercially available from the professional objects of our enthusiasm... making sure we do everything possible to get money into the hands of the artists themselves who created these legacies is of utmost importance. I do not download, share or trade music or video that is commercially available.
That said, I also highly value the spirit of derivative creativity, and that includes appreciation for the culture of trading and sharing of the amateur-made products of fan-created enthusiasm, without profit by fans.
As anyone who still has a hoard of mix cassettes from the 1980s will tell you, fans can and will buy concert tickets, tie-in merchandise, books, multiple CD and DVD and online releases of the same material... and still cling joyously and stubbornly to the one fading recording we made off the radio that we played in high school or college until the cassette tape died.
And then we will eventually realize that the web has made it possible for us to find other fans who might have taped the same broadcast, and managed to preserve it digitally before time and life's passing have disintegrated the recording completely... and the faded past lives bright for us once again.
Sometimes we mash two or three of our favorite songs together, or create fan-made music videos as tributes or meta-analysis of the source materials.
Or sometimes, there was a concert that we would have done anything to attend, but the universe stacked the cards against us, either because it was too far away, or maybe we weren't old enough (or in some cases, even born yet!)... but someone was there that night and recorded it, and decades later, an imperfect digitalization of the recording found its way onto the web through a convoluted pathway that defies every known bit of logic on earth, to somehow survive the entropy of time... and we find it, sit back and just listen, reunited with our dream, and there's this perfect, perfect moment of listening or watching. There's nothing else quite like that.
And I don't know about all of you, but at that point, as soon as my next paycheck clears, I usually end up down the street at my local indy music store, or clicking to buy Yet Another Large Haul off Amazon.com, because the strength of memory has brought another piece of our past to the forefront of our minds, and we have to find another album or another movie or another music video that was adjacent to that memory... and it's now commercially available.
Never, never, never buy bootleg recordings, please. Share the spirit of the fan community with respect to both fans and original creators.
Thanks for reading, and no matter what you're a fan of, thank you for sharing your enthusiasm with the world.
May we all live passionately, create as the spirit moves us, sing at every available opportunity, and dance like no one's watching...