As the Christmas buying season officially kicks off with this week’s “Black Friday”, University of Kansas student Lyndsey Havens offers her perspective on digital purchases.

Back when playing the game “Never Have I Ever” was fun and considerably entertaining, I would always start with the same one. “Never have I ever stolen something.” It somehow didn’t occur to me that I had in fact stolen not just one thing in an isolated incident, but I had stolen many things many times. I had stolen music.

The concept of “stealing,” or illegally downloading music on the Internet, is no new phenomenon. In fact, the word stealing might even seem a little harsh considering the commonality of the act. But that’s what it is after all — isn’t it? Why is it that when it comes to the digital economy, our consumer conscious disappears?

…Honestly, for some time, I too believed that this could be enough. Though I have, and still do, praise the importance of live performance and often fashion concert and band T-shirts — I learned that this is no way to truly support any musician for their work. Is it possible that we the fans have become the sell-outs here? Applauding ourselves for attending a show or buying a shirt, when in reality what most artists want is to be making money for just that — their art.A documentary currently in the works titled “Unsound” explores these exact concepts in detail. According to the official site, “Unsound” will reveal “the dramatic collapse of the music industry and the unintended consequences the Internet revolution is having on creators of all kinds. Featuring noteworthy musicians, filmmakers, journalists and beyond, “Unsound explores the struggle for creators trying to survive in the age of free,” according to unsoundthemovie.com.

While the most prominent digital music marketplace, iTunes, along with streaming services such as Pandora and Spotifiy, seem to have figured out how to generate a ton of money in this “age of free,” the “creators of all kinds” still have a ways to go. Last October, the Future of Music Coalition held their annual Future of Music Summit. The summit addresses current issues facing the music industry, and the “ins-and-outs of digital business models and revenue generation” certainly made the list on futureofmusic.org.

While everyone in the music industry desires and craves some sort of digital business model — some magic fix that will glue together pieces of the past with fragile fragments of the future — I think that for now, we as the Internet savvy, social-media-addicted, digital-dominating generation, need to develop a consumer consciousness applicable to the digital economy that we will continue to live in.

From the industrial revolution to the digital one ­— never have I ever been more eagerly concerned to see what we will do next.