We are music lovers or we wouldn't do what we do. No one has to ask us if music impacts our emotions, our moods and hopefully our livelihoods. Like so many other industry folk, all we want is to get paid for doing what we love. But I wonder, are you downloading music illegally?

There are ever-increasing numbers of the public who are clicking illegally to get that aural fix and it's never been so easy to get it before. Millions of households have downloaded and used countless free, music rip-off tools. They are like viruses that the RIAA attempts to inoculate, only to find out another offspring was born under a different name and group of techie college kids. But are you the musician, performer or industry pro doing what I equate to stealing a candy bar from the convenience store? OK, to be fair, on my block growing up we all took a bit of candy before learning it was wrong. Ah, the innocent lessons of life.

Through our laws, music is an intellectual property that goes to the root of the American ideals of invention and the protection and exploitation of creativity. These laws helped our industry flourish where many have made a mint for penning that undeniable hit tune. Record labels have long been thought of as murky, ruthless Mafiosos of music, but at least for many years they facilitated income from an art form. Although greedily helping themselves, they looked after the roost - or rather, they used to!

When the CD was born the industry had its sacred cash cow and profits rocketed to new heights as consumers scrambled to replace and expand their music libraries. But with the advent of yet another new media, this time digital downloads, why didn't the industry capitalize all over again? I think the cow got a bit too fat for its own good!

To be sure, the consolidation of major labels to three conglomerates who bought up most of the successful indie labels and the monster majors began a churning for that quarterly profit. Got to keep that board of directors happy and make deadline so the shareholders get their return. What a way to deal with experimental art forms.

Add to that heaps of disgruntled consumers who bought a new CD, only to discover one great song sandwiched in a watered-down tracklist of fluff. Granted, we get to see the lavish music videos which cost into the ?blingazillions. Buy 10, get one. She sure looked good in that video, but I had no idea she couldn't sing. At the same time, the homogenizing of music increased as the majors continued to reverse-engineer music from the radio format backwards, only putting out records that sounded just like what was on the radio at the moment - all sounding the same.

Then households were inundated with PCs with CD burners. Every kid in America figured out that burning a CD costs under a buck and sounded the same. Any other industry would have dropped its prices right away. But the P&L spreadsheets had to cover the video costs and the marketing dollars spent to promote - well an artist that sounds like everyone else. Dog chasing tail comes to mind.

For years, the majors hid behind their distribution. If you want your CD in stores, you got to pay the man. That means playing it their way. Filtered down, reverse-engineered pop music machinery for $17.98 a pop. This hardly created value for consumers by any means.

Then digital distribution came as a huge threat. The monster majors feared the loss of their control and power. They moved too slowly and, heck, are still trying to figure out how to deal with it. I guess it took an outsider like iTunes to realize it was easier than anyone realized and they surely proved it's what the people wanted: a cheaper alternative with decent quality and the ability to purchase it in your own home. Had they been quicker to get into the game themselves and catered more toward the single then maybe they could have avoided the millions gobbling up free offerings of shared-music archives.

Enter the RIAA suing the little man, and a black eye for the majors who tried to block copying on CDs with the failed DRM, and the shooting-in-the-foot gets worse and worse. Now the RIAA has been demonized for trying to protect the legal rights that exist, but are being ignored by the new culture of downloading.

Creators should be able to choose what they wish to give for free. The money that the RIAA paid to lawyers should have been spent on educating our youth on the rights of creators. Labels should have reacted much sooner to the paradigm shift in distribution and should have kept making albums worth listening to, not flimsy plastic CDs with only one good song. The creator has always been the last one to get paid. But free means no one gets paid. I, for one, will not be eating a candy bar I didn't pay for. But I do want it to at least be delicious from the first to the last bite.

Rob Nolfe is a royalty auditor and owner of MZK Entertainment, LLC (www.mzkentertainment.com).