When it comes to music, I listen mostly to a really weird alternative-indie-folk mix (we can chat if you're interested.) But first I want to tell you about me "discovering" music.

When I was 15, I actually started listening to music. By which I mean, I started paying attention to the lyrics, and to my own tastes. Then suddenly, for the first time in my life, I wanted access to music in a way that hadn't mattered before.

The first thing I did was download everything I had on hard-copy disks to my computer and stick it in iTunes. Then, when I realized that it would be useless to own everything both in hard copy and digitally, I moved on to the iTunes store. And that was great except that at this point I am not financially independent. And believe me, I could easily have blown $100 on albums I was interested in.

Then I put two and two together: the public library has a lot of music to borrow. It's free. It's not that fast when I have to get stuff delivered from other libraries, but the anticipation is actually kind of fun.

I figured there was a chance I wouldn't be allowed to download music from TPL CDs. I thought they might be blocked or protected, but as it turns out, they aren't. I somehow doubt I'm the only person to come up with this idea.

Here's what got me thinking: I don't own that music. But does iTunes? Does the library? Who makes money off this stuff? So I did a little research.

Not that the internet is necessarily the most reliable source, but here's what I found out:

"Right off the top, Apple takes ~$0.30 from that $0.99 sale. Of the $0.69 left, half goes to the label. The other half goes to the publisher once the label's initial investment in the artist has been recouped. Generally speaking, a label invests somewhere in the neighborhood of $300-500k for artists. And with digital sales being what they are these days, that means an artist really only starts getting paid after they've sold nearly half a million downloads." (Quora)

So in theory, yes, by using iTunes I would be "buying" a song and that would be more ethically correct than ripping that song from Youtube or importing a CD from the library. But mostly I would be paying Apple and the record label. In my mind, that's not really okay either. 

I'm not trying to justify my CD-borrowing practices, but at least I know that someone, somewhere, bought that physical object and some of that money went back to the artists. 

This problem doesn't get any simpler the further I wade into the digital world. Let's say I have music in my iTunes library and I use it to make a playlist, which I then burn onto a hard copy disk. Do I have any creative rights to that content? Not really. Even though I am technically in possession of those songs, and I put them on a disk that I can hold in my hands. 

And for the record, the library doesn't have everything I'm looking for, so I will eventually be forced onto iTunes or take up some other illegal measures in order to get my hands on any Anais Mitchell albums other than Child Ballads. 

Sources:
https://www.quora.com/Do-artists-bands-get-the-money-I-spend-on-iTunes