Music Download: A Boon or a Bane?

The internet was termed as the greatest revolution since the invention of radio in the information technology industry, but with the advent of the broadband connections and high speed internet connections available for phones etc. there seems to be no end to this permanent revolution. Just as every coin has two sides, the information technology revolution also has the other side too; the ease of data sharing has led to a loss of millions of dollars for the publishers of books, music companies and film makers.

The way people consume music and movies has been totally revolutionized by the high speed internet connections. It has become so easy to download music and movies for the people to who love music that there is no more bothering of buying music from the music stores. So many music stores from around the world have complained about the loss of mass customer bases in the last decade.

A few clicks of mouse and a few minutes wait, that’s what it takes to get the latest album of the favorite band from music download website. The number of illegal music download and buffering websites has also increased at an alarming pace. Of late, some state sponsored programs have been able to check the illegal hosting and sale of music online by the some of the companies that do not pay a share of their earnings to the music producing companies and keep the entire profits to themselves.

It is very hard for the state to check illegal file sharing through ftp software because of the complexities in the modern technology. Besides this, there are a number of legal music download websites as well. These websites enter into deals with the main music producing companies such as Sony, EMI, and Universal etc. and allow the music produced from their companies to be downloaded by their customers after paying certain amount of monthly or annual charges or a predefined number of downloads.

Illegal music downloading began in 1999 with the coming of Napster. The company was held into leading proceedings by none other than Metallica when they found their songs being played on radio via Napster. Thereafter the company was forced to pay millions of dollars for their act. Whatever might have happened to Napster, the fact of the day is that illegal music downloading industry is thriving and a person has no way of knowing whether the website she or he is dealing with a legal or an illegal music website.