In general the opinions of others jive with my own here. It's simply true that, with so much bland or just plain bad music, you just cant go to the store and buy something whilst retaining even a semblance of a chance it will be decent. The way I do it; I look at opinions, word of mouth, and then download. It's not uncommon for me to swipe entire albums this way in torrents or whatnot (or even entire discographies!). That said, I dont have the space or will or care to archive an ever increasing catalog of music I don't like; most of it gets deleted after a listen. I probably retain about 2% of the music I download.
A good example recently is Tool. I had heard a bit of it before of course, I finally got around to finding it for myself. It was brought to my attention by a friend again the other day. Easily found the entire discography, had it within an hour, started listening. I can appreciate the work but I simply don't like most of it. It's still around, but I wont retain all that if I dont listen to it.
Just today I picked up another Symphony X CD, Divine Wings of Tragedy special edition. I had had the original version way back, friend got a hold of it and etc (you know how that is, lol). Of course I still had all the downloaded songs on my hard disk, thats how I was exposed in the first place. Well, now that I bought it I ripped it all at 320kbps (lmao), I have a nice actual CD for the collection, and I feel the artist gets whats due. That's the way it should be, pay for what you feel is worth paying for. Anyway. Just from The Accolade and Divine Wings alone, I'm happy to pay for that twice and I'd pay for it a third time because I enjoy this stuff and its my pleasure to give back for it. Make quality music, you get paid, I think thats the way it really works despite all of the piracy. Piracy is here to stay but luckily I think its true that it has its merits and the talented people are still successful. I look at the internet not as offering individuals a way to steal, but more so stripping the industry of its ability to fool us into buying sad music that we couldnt listen to first. Of course its abused, but thats really it I think. If not for the net and illegal downloads, it would be less money coming out of my pocket, and I think that's true of more people than is assumed.
But that's just my take on it. I'm not an industry analyst or whatever, I just listen to some music.
Josh
Uh oh... you're in big trouble!!! 
