harry - you can listen to it for free at
http://theseestates.bandcamp.com, and then conveniently pay to actually own it there also! although paypal are sure taking their sweet time getting money from you to me. hypothesis is currently that everyone who's bought the album so far has paid with ghost dollars.
and who's a middleman - corey rusk? the dudes behind jagjaguwar? the way that a good label operates is by getting people to pay attention to its releases and the bands it releases. it develops a reputation for quality, as a good curator should. never even mind that the labels gave us, say, black sabbath, and that free music has given us wavves. never mind that the guy who asks for thousands of dollars is now a press agent (most bands have one of these). these smaller labels doing good work are seeing the same thing happen to them that's happening to the major labels - touch & go shut its doors last year, remember?
borrowing music is on a fundamental level different from free music, because there
is a middleman - it's your dude who had the free record. the band isn't knocking on your door and pressing a copy of their album into your hand - someone who you trust had to listen to it. another
listener - emphasized for really strong reasons - who heard it, and felt it necessary to share it.
this idea of direct access between artist and fan is in a lot of ways a load of hooey, because the steps between artist and fan are frequently actually pretty good steps to have. as a listener, i like talking with other listeners, and not only hearing the risks they've made but sharing the risks i've made. i also like labels, because it means i can look on the back of something and go, "oh, this is something i'll probably like because it's on jagjaguwar," or "oh wow barsuk is putting out the d-plan's
emergency & i on vinyl," you know? the idea that everything except the listener and the artist is an adversary is a grim combination of naďvete and ego.
and - besides all that - i don't think i have the time as a listener to listen to something that the artist involved doesn't even feel bothered to place a value on. there's so much out there that i'll never even get to - i might as well show the artists i like that i at least respect the token price of appreciation they've charged me.