Is Music Bottled Water?

A young woman in her twenties helped me import my contacts from an old phone into a new phone. This process is quite tedious when going between devices built by competing manufactures (like Apple to Droid) - and it has nothing to do with the fact that I have 2,197 contacts. 

Mine was a particularly tough case - none of the techs had seen anything like it before. We worked on this issue for six hours over 2 days (they sent me home with Google homework) until someone back at the store had a clever idea, and it worked.

With the transfer of contacts finally complete I relaxed and began to ask about all the neat features on my shiny new and improved. "How can I import all of the music I bought on my old phone into this bad boy?" I asked.

She looks a bit evasive and says, "Well we can't do that here… There are ways …"

"Ya mean I have to go online and find the hack for it."

"Right. These companies are like fren-emies, and they don't make sharing easy."

"So …"

"So you can go like this … and enter a search for your song and buy it here. But personally, I don't like to pay for anything, so I just type 'free mp3s' into the search field and you can get all kinds of music for free!"

I know that this attitude has been around at least since Napster. But I still wonder where it comes from - what's the precedent? When I was a kid the only people who got and expected things for free were kids, beggars, and thieves (I'm not counting birthdays!). I am nearly certain that most adults who expect music to be free do not see themselves as kids, beggars or thieves. So where does the idea that something worked so hard on should be free come from, is there an historic precedent? Music clearly has a very high value to society - people crave it, everywhere, all the time!

I imagine a Native American from the distant past walking into a store and seeing the bottled water on a shelf. Why not just take some? Water is the gift of Earth to all who walk upon it! I can understand that if you are brought up to expect a thing to be free then the idea of paying for it would seem absurd. Yet so much work is put into making and producing and distributing music. Is there anything else in the marketplace that is expected to be free after it has been crafted? 

Please help me to understand this mind set - where does it come from? 

In the meantime, enjoy some of my homemade music here!