Legalised piracy?

I have a bit of a dilemma. With the purchase of my cellphone I also got free access to the Nokia Music Store for a year. Yeah, it was the main reason why I even got the phone in the first place. The problem is that I feel I am somehow robbing the artists I want to support.

I imagine that the artists see very little of the money I paid for this access (roughly $100). At the same time, being a low-income (soon to be no-income) parent I can't really afford to actually purchase all the stuff I want. This means I will have to limit myself to a select few bands - 16volt, Society Burning, Skold, Chemlab, Sunna, KMFDM, H3llb3nt (who incidentally might reunite, according to rumours).

This is especially awkward when it comes to less-than-ethical record companies (*cough*Invisible*cough*) - who make a lot of their catalogue available on digital download stores such as Nokia and iTunes (doubtless without even informing the artists - much less paying them).

Still, the flipside is that I've discovered a lot of new (to me) music - which, if ever I get a decent income, will end up on my list of select few (yet increasing) number of bands to purchase music from. The most recent discovery is BT (Brian Transeau), electronica musician who's contributed to a bunch of movie soundtracks (Blade II, 3000 Miles to Graceland, Go, Domino as well as entire scores to Monster, The Fast and the Furious and Stealth among others). I'd actually heard him before - his collaboration with The Roots on the soundtrack for Blade II is pretty kick-ass - but he just never stuck. A tip from Boom (of Society Burning) sent me to the Nokia store, and I noticed they had a couple of BT's singles, and today I noticed that the upcoming album was there in full, a day before the official release date.

I'm just not sure what to think of this. On the one hand, this is a good way of getting exposed to a lot of new music without explicitly violating copyright terms. On the other hand, I really don't think this feeds anyone other than the (more and more obsolete) record labels.

If piracy is about depriving the artist of income from their hard work, the question is: "Is this just legalised piracy?".