Last week, Jammie Thomas was found liable of copyright infringement and now must pay $222,000 for 24 songs that she downloaded off of Kazaa in 2005.

The Los Angeles Times has a column “Analyzing a music pirate’s playlist“.  The songs are pretty much what would be expected of a 30 year old single mother with children aged 11 and 13.

Thomas’ list has hipsters groaning. It includes some of the most banal Top 40 songs of recent memory: songs by 1980s balladeers Richard Marx and Bryan Adams, quiet-storm beauty queen Vanessa Williams, and the feathered-hair kings in Journey. Teen tastes may be represented by the presence of Green Day and Linkin Park tracks. “In her defense,” one respondent posted on the pop-music blog Idolator, “I wouldn’t pay for any of these songs either.”

But look at the list beyond the prejudices of taste, and another quality surfaces: it’s eclectic. A Reba McEntire track represents classic country. There’s some Gloria Estefan for that Latin freestyle flavor. It’s easy to imagine Thomas chilling out to Sarah McLachlan’s “Building a Mystery” after her kids were in bed, or getting out her aggressions after a hard day at the office — she works for her own tribe, the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwa, in the natural resources department — by turning up “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses.

The column, written by Ann Powers, highlights a possible reason as to why people continue to download music even with the risks of facing lawsuits from the RIAA.

True, Thomas could have burned a CD of these tracks, from the vast record collection she claims to own. She could have purchased the songs again from iTunes. But what she probably really wanted to do was just hear them occasionally, the way you hear songs on the radio. She wanted a wide array of music, easily available. Radio, split into niche markets and limited by tiny, repetitive playlists, wasn’t giving her that.

Music piracy is estimated to cost $4.5 billion.