NPR Intern Gets an Earful After Blogging About 11,000 Songs, Almost None Paid For

In the NPR post, a 20-year-old intern named Emily White wrote that despite being “an avid music listener, concertgoer and college radio D.J.,” with an iTunes library of 11,000 songs, she has bought only 15 CDs in her life. “As monumental a role as musicians and albums have played in my life,” she wrote, “I’ve never invested money in them aside from concert tickets and T-shirts.”

Ms. White went on to describe some typical Gen-Y behaviors about acquiring digital music: ripping CDs; copying friends’ song files; being given 15 gigabytes of music by a prom date. Curiously, she noted that aside from “a few” tracks that she obtained through the now-defunct file-sharing service Kazaa, most were not “illegally” downloaded.