Humans love music. It's universal. It goes back even before human language. Humans are also greedy assholes. Thus it is no surprise that when you combine music and greed you get either the largest collection of thieves in the world, or the most cut-throat corporate pirates of all time.

Personally, we hope they kill each other off and leave the rest of us who are willing to pay for music we like to listen to and sample music before we pay for it in peace.

And on that note (har!), let's move on to some artists whose music we are willing to pay for!

"Weird" Al Yankovic

Some artists get no respect. I mean, you become famous for shamelessly ripping off the music of others, being an uber-geek and making a cult movie that even cult movie fans admit is only worth the occasional sit through and people begin to not take you seriously as an artist. We don't believe Al would have it any other way. Let's ignore the fact that our favorite songs of his are completely original and the man is funny as a monkey on hallucinigens. You should buy his albums solely because we told you to. Or you could just leech his music off the internet for free like the mindless end-users you are and see for yourself why Weird Al Yankovic is your GOD!

Sparks

Now, at least most of you will have at least heard of Weird Al, but I imagine most people's response to "Sparks" is "huh?". Except for a select few Europeans. Bless you, Europeans, for you know good music. Trying to explain the irreverent post-avant-garde-pop of Sparks is impossible without sounding as pretentious as "irreverent post-avant-garde", so just go to their website; there's plenty of sample tracks (and videos!) to complement your browsing experience. The "Gratuitous Sax and Senseless Violins" album rocks my world, and should rock yours too. Hell, in this case I'd even encourage downloading, since trying to find them on file-sharing services is so hard you'll probably STILL have to get the albums to attempt to satiate your unquenchable thirst for more. Obanime, did you know they were doing the soundtrack for the proposed Mai The Psychic Girl musical? It's true, it's true.

Chris de Burgh

Speaking of Europeans and good music, another artist that you probably only remember because of his one popular song in the US (Lady in Red) is Chris de Burgh. Unlike most artists these days, De Burgh is a SONGWRITER. He is, perhaps, one of the few remaining poetic songwriters in the entire music industry. His songs aren't written to be popular or snappy; they are written to be moving. Whether they are moving you to tears, to happiness, or just to the occasional good laugh, Chris de Burgh is a premiere artist who does not get near enough credit and attention from the mainstream. Go, buy his music.

Wow, this isn't nearly as sarcastic and theoretically funny as the rest of the links/rest of the website/rest of everything we've ever written ever. Well, what can we say? We take our music seriously. So do something useful with the vast preponderance of pirated music available to anyone with a Net connection and check out the above artists. Blade also recommends Merril Bainbridge (yes, she did more than "Mouth"), and would have linked to her page, if she had one. Epsi would have recommended Linkin Park, but everyone in the world has already pirated their music, so it's unnecessary.