Illegaly downloading music is like stealing bottled water

I've heard a lot of people claim their illegal downloading of music is sort of like Robin Hood, stealing from the rich music companies and giving to the poor (themselves). Makes it sound almost noble.

The trouble is that there is too much good free music for this analogy to hold up. Which is why I like to compare it to stealing bottled water instead. Everyone knows bottled water is not really that much better than that which effectively comes out of your tap for free*. They make an insane profit by convincing everyone they need expensive, fancy bottled water, the greedy bastards. So let's fix this injustice by stealing the bottled water. Except then the retail outlet loses money. And you could just get the water from your tap.

It's the same, in my opinion, as illegally downloading music, except with the roles reversed (the makers unfairly lose money, not the distributors). If you really cared about the injustice you wouldn't steal the music, you would do more to support various movements such as Creative Commons which give artists much finer control over how their music is used and netlabels which as a culture tends to give more rights over to the artists.

I'm building up a catalogue of good sources for free music at the moment. I've got a few sites, but I want to be able to cover a wide range of music, and unfortunately a lot of good free music does tend to skew to the hip-pop/drum and base/instrumental side of things. I'm also working on some criteria by which to classify a record label as "fair", which obviously is more difficult than "the artist has chosen to put the music out for free" which is why I'm starting with free music.

* For this to work, think of the water bills as equating to your internet bills, though it doesn't really. But it fits better than Robin Hood. Besides, most people I know using the Robin Hood example have never paid their own water bills.