• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, March 6, 2006

After Apple rewarded Alex Ostrovsky, a Michigan teenager, for buying the billionth download from the iTunes Music Store, giving him everything from a computer to yet more iP0ds and 10 grands' worth of iTune credits, he was so tied up with press interviews that he missed his flight to the Burning Record celebration held annually in the Nevada desert.

"I am so bummed," Ostrovsky might have, but didn't really, tell MediaPost. "It's the first year since I starting going in 2001 that I wasn't there to burn the record."

The record is a 40-foot-high replica of a vinyl LP disc that used to be sold by the record companies. Each year thousands of file-sharing celebrants gather for four days of trading playlists of music they've illegally downloaded off the Internet. It is estimated that they trade over a billion songs in the first 24 hours of the event.

The festival culminates in a massive bonfire built around the record, into which is thrown old albums, 8 tracks, cassettes and CDs. Thousands of drunken and/or drug-altered high school and college students and aging film executives hoping to recapture their youths, chant "Burn The Record," and dance around the bonfire in what has been described by the Recording Industry Association of America as "an orgy of destruction."

"Alex Ostrovsky is a pussy," said one of this year's festival attendants, a University of Texas sophomore from Austin who had vomited 'shrooms on his Mao Tse Tung tee shirt. "Look around you--there are about 10,000 of us here and nobody ever pays to download a song. Not even the ones already passed out, man."

"I had about 300 albums, then about 250 cassettes, then had to buy it all again when CDs came out," said an older man who refused to be identified for fear that his wife would find out that he was in Nevada chasing drunken college girls rather than at the 4As Media Conference. "I had about 50 operas I transferred from records to reel-to-reel tape; then they stopped making tape decks and I got screwed the fourth time. Every song I download so I can customize my playlists, I've already bought three or four times in the past."

"A billion songs--is that a lot?" asked a high school student from California. "I know it's like more than a million--but like, a lot more, or what? And they get 99 cents for each one, so that's like 99 billion cents, right? Whoa, dude, that's a lot of pennies. Wow, blows my mind just thinking about a billion songs all playing at once. Have you seen a guy like with a Raider's sticker in his window, man? His name is Bob...or Rob...whew. Yeah."

"This is just the start," one of the festival organizers could have told MediaPost, but didn't. "In the fall, we're going to start Burning Movies; then, thanks to Google, in about a year we're going to launch Burning Books. In a year or two I'm sure we'll also have a Burning TV Shows thing going too. All jest a matter of digital time."