"Stealing" music was about to be taken to an entirely new level with my plan.  It started with the blank cassette tape, with which you could dub off a copy of any album for your friends.  It was somewhat time consuming, though when high speed dubbing came about you could pull it off in less than half the time it took to hear the entire album.  Record labels didn't really seem to care much about the implications here, figuring it was a sort of free advertising and not very easy or logical to track and go after people making single copies that they weren't even charging for.  They also felt that since a cassette tape was an inferior analog format rather than a perfect digital copy, consumers would continue to require a "master" copy on digital media.  Lastly, the circle of friends one could reasonably copy from was limited by geography and social standing. (As a compromise reached much later, a tax sent a portion of blank media sales to the music industry in order to make up for potentially lost revenues.) 

MP3, broadband Internet, and peer to peer file sharing modernized the concept of dubbing an album to a blank tape and greatly expanded trading circles, and suddenly the minor problem that was mostly ignored became a huge deal when it began effecting the bottom line of the record labels.  The labels would all scream for the rights of the artists, when really there was a hidden agenda.  The Internet is a far more efficient way to distribute music than the bulky, assembly line processes of manufacturing a compact disc, cassette, or LP.  The role of the record company could easily be diminished if not eliminated by the new technology, leaving them just to promote and pay for recordings.  Their slice of the pie would become substantially smaller, and established acts may not need them at all anymore.  This danger lead to lawsuits galore and one of the larger scandals in music history.

Was it wrong to teach my Dad some hits of the future, stealing potential royalties from the artists that created them?  I can justify file sharing by saying it creates hype, selling concert tickets and increasing album sales by fans who want to support the bands.  But if someone stole the song from the artist before it was ever created, that was much worse.  The potential for profit was gone.  One single can make or break a band's career.  Would Nirvana have been as big as they were without “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to start the phenomenon?

I knew I'd never get caught, but is it right for a lover of music to undermine the creation, arguably the most important part of the system?  At this point I realized that I had no problem eliminating Nelson from existence, but had a real moral dilemma over denying Huey Lewis credit for “The Heart of Rock and Roll” under quite similar circumstances.  Am I really that bad of a person?  I suppose everything's relative.

Weighing all of the pros and cons I eventually settled on a reasonable compromise in my head.  I'd only teach my Dad one song per artist, and it wouldn't be their biggest hit.  After this was all done, I'd steer him away from a musical career, leaving my meddling as a hidden footnote in the annals of the college of musical knowledge.  And if perchance my family got a few royalty checks out of it in the future, would that really hurt anyone?

I had the perfect song to start with.  “Unsingable Name,” an obscure non-album track from the early solo career of former Soul Coughing frontman Mike Doughty.  It fit this situation almost perfectly.  As the story goes, a girl he was dating kept asking him to write a song about her.  Unfortunately, he couldn't find a word that rhymed with her name.  Thus the unsingable name.