Downloading, for or against?

I wanted to know what do you think about downloading, are you doing it to get movies or music, or are you against it?

I get music from downloading the majority of the time! I personally don't have the money to spend on CDs. If I want to support an artist, I support them by going to their shows or buying merchandise. If I really LOVE an artist, I might buy their CD but usually I just download torrents. As far as films, I pay for netflix and buy a lot of movies. I don't usually download movies for free because it takes too long. Maybe when I have a stable income in the future, I'll stop downloading and buy everything. But considering I don't even have a job right now, downloadings my only option!

FOR LEGAL DOWNLOADING

for illegal or legal
ill still buy the cds if its good enough cause there is nothing like having it.

Yeah, it's the same for me, i like to download, but if I really like an artist I'm gonna buy his cds.

I feel that an artist should be more concerned with people experiencing what ever they have produced than profiting off of it. That is not to say that they shouldn't make money off of their art form, otherwise there would be significantly less art and it would be difficult to survive. I am mainly talking about money grubbing assholes such as Metallica who already make so much money that it shouldn't matter whether or not people pay for their music. They basically ripped off Kyuss anyways. If I really like a band I am most likely going to go buy their cd to support them and to simply have it. However, If I have never heard of a band before downloading is a good way for me to check them out. Basically I don't see any real ethical problem with it.

I use Soulseek to download music (though I've recently flirted with BitTorrent on the rare occasion that I couldn't find something on Soulseek).

One of the reasons I find it interesting is that it was designed to be a haven for the more obscure corners of music which could be hard (bordering on impossible) to find using previous P2P networks -- Kazaa, Napster, Limewire, et al.
It's also tailored to enable easier downloading of albums as a whole (folders) rather than individual tracks (files). So, in that case, it's an interesting paradox -- a futurist vessel for the trafficking of new formats, built for listeners who still think, as I do, that there's a certain quality the album possesses which seems to be more than the sum of its parts, that the album is the nexus where the grandeur and scope of a single artistic statement meets our own finite attention spans, each at their most preferable levels. People to whom worship of classic or favorite albums, akin to the canonization of the Great American Novel, is inseparable from love of music.

Paying to download mp3 files of songs/albums seems strange to me -- to me, despite the fact that a good deal of my music-listening takes place while at my laptop, it feels like a tentative measure when it's removed from the tangible, physical item.
Not even taking into account the superior quality of analog sound's frequency range -- on a conceptual level, I like to think of my collection and my favorite music as an actual groove spiraling inward within a finite amount of space, as opposed an endless stream of ones and zeroes. But I digress...
If I really like something, I want the slab of wax.
Why would I pay $10 or however much for a cluster of files to pull up on my computer when, for around that or slightly more, I could get a hold of the (ahem) real thing?

For me, though, truth be told, I often have something of an ulterior motive when I'm buying music, being that I am a DJ/turntablist. My consumption and my production (I am reminded of Willis and grounded aesthetics) are tied together in a more directly observable sense than most people...