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The Truth About Music Downloading
Companies, musicians and users battle in fight for music
By Brian Elwell

Imagine you’re an up and coming music artist, your song just broke out on the radio and you’re expecting CD sales to jump; but they don’t because, why buy a CD when you can download it? The career of a musician was already extremely hard before music downloading was even invented and now it is nearly impossible. Music downloading has been a huge issue in the past six years with the start of the first major peer-to-peer downloading agent, Napster. After a year or two of running without a snag Napster was shut down by the recording industry. Most music-loving teens thought it was a great idea to be able to download any song they wanted for totally free and not have to buy a bad CD for just one song. After Napster was stopped many other companies started to surface like, Limewire, WinMx, and the most popular Kazaa.

These companies found ways around the law to make sure that they wouldn’t get in trouble but the people sharing their files would. But to make it seem legal many companies have a fee that says pay once and you will get unlimited downloads. Many teens fell into this trap, which could almost be called fraud. Most of these twenty-dollar and up fees do not go to the recording industry or any labels but actually goes straight to head of the company.

The real truth to it is you can’t be sued for downloading any thing, or at least no one has been yet. Where you get in trouble is when someone downloads from you. Most services have an option to turn sharing off, but they are usually followed by consequences, like bad connection speeds. But if everyone turns off sharing then no one can download. Most statistics show that you are only really liable to get busted if you have more then 1000 songs that you are sharing without permission. The biggest scare is the penalty for getting caught. With a minimum fine of $750 per song, the numbers start to add up and most teens would be paying into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Recently two companies have emerged in the truly legal downloads. iTunes is Apple’s attempt to steal away all those teens that don’t want to get caught. When iTunes first started it was a hit, with 150 million songs from Jay Z to Miles Davis, all for the low price of 99 cents per song. Then Real player decided to rival iTunes with their Rhapsody. But with the lower price of 79 cents per song there is a much lower selection with only 800,000 songs. But then again why pay when you can download for free?