The Rise of Legitimate Music Downloads
For years people have been downloading music off the internet for free and then a year or two ago the music industry said it was finally going to let you do it legally for less than a pound. Yes but we were getting for free before. For people who had been downloading music off the internet suddenly having to pay for it was going to take a lot of getting used to. I had always thought I had joined the mp3 revolution late having not started till early 2002 but compared with the many people now downloading legally I am a veteran. I was never a peer-2-peer junkie, the idea of giving unknown people access to my computer just didn't seem right to me, but I was still able to find many sites that let me download mp3s straight off the Internet. Downloading music became a game that was played with the web servers as you tried to download the song before it was taken off the server. To prolong an mp3s life on a server it would often be renamed as something innocuous like a Word document or a class file. Sometimes they were downloaded as compressed files and I would have to find the right program to decompress it and that often led to finding the compressed file was password protected. But this was no problem since the web site I'd downloaded the file from would have the password or at least a list of a hundred passwords to choose from!
I downloaded hundreds of mp3s in this way before I started finding that my favourite download sites were disappearing before my eyes or were being rebranded as music discussion sites with no downloads in sight! One by one the best sites fell under the axe. Even the legitimate ones seemed to fall by the wayside. Many of my early downloads were garnered from mp3.com until it was sold to CNET Networks who stopped the free streaming and downloading and turned it into a site about music downloads but without any actual downloads. I'm sure there are other sites out there that do what mp3.com used to do but I'm sure none are as widespread in their appeal. Many artists including Linkin Park and Madonna released songs on this site for either streaming or downloading, but now you usually have to pay to do either of these. How things have changed.
There are still one or two sites out there that offer free downloads but they are very rare and I'm sure still struggle against the authorities. I shan't be giving their addresses out since that would just be inviting their closure and I want to be able to still use them. I have no qualms about downloading music off the internet for free and intend to carry on doing so for as long as I can. I see downloading mp3s as a sort of song review to let me decide whether an album is worth buying. I will often download some or even all the songs off an album in order to decide whether to buy it. I buy a lot more albums now than I used to before I was downloading music. In my eyes I am paying for those downloads with my increased album buying. Of course, the Music Industry may not see it like that.
Meanwhile the legitimate download sites continue to increase in popularity. I recently noticed that the number of legal downloads exceeded physical sales for the last week of 2004, which was the first time it has ever happened. Undoubtedly there are many reasons for that: Most shops were closed over the long holiday weekend while the web sites weren't; also I'm sure another big factor was the large number of iPod's and other music players received over Christmas by people new to downloading music off the internet. But it does set the scene for a momentous year of legal downloads. Later in the year the download chart will merge with the singles chart and perhaps we will once again have a singles chart we can be proud off. (I'd better stop there before I start off on a tirade about the poor quality of the music on the singles chart!)
Legal music downloads are definitely here to stay despite what a few die-hards such as myself may say. If the choice available from these sites increases and the price continues to fall (now down to 69p from some sites) you never know, I may even pay to download a track myself.
I downloaded hundreds of mp3s in this way before I started finding that my favourite download sites were disappearing before my eyes or were being rebranded as music discussion sites with no downloads in sight! One by one the best sites fell under the axe. Even the legitimate ones seemed to fall by the wayside. Many of my early downloads were garnered from mp3.com until it was sold to CNET Networks who stopped the free streaming and downloading and turned it into a site about music downloads but without any actual downloads. I'm sure there are other sites out there that do what mp3.com used to do but I'm sure none are as widespread in their appeal. Many artists including Linkin Park and Madonna released songs on this site for either streaming or downloading, but now you usually have to pay to do either of these. How things have changed.
There are still one or two sites out there that offer free downloads but they are very rare and I'm sure still struggle against the authorities. I shan't be giving their addresses out since that would just be inviting their closure and I want to be able to still use them. I have no qualms about downloading music off the internet for free and intend to carry on doing so for as long as I can. I see downloading mp3s as a sort of song review to let me decide whether an album is worth buying. I will often download some or even all the songs off an album in order to decide whether to buy it. I buy a lot more albums now than I used to before I was downloading music. In my eyes I am paying for those downloads with my increased album buying. Of course, the Music Industry may not see it like that.
Meanwhile the legitimate download sites continue to increase in popularity. I recently noticed that the number of legal downloads exceeded physical sales for the last week of 2004, which was the first time it has ever happened. Undoubtedly there are many reasons for that: Most shops were closed over the long holiday weekend while the web sites weren't; also I'm sure another big factor was the large number of iPod's and other music players received over Christmas by people new to downloading music off the internet. But it does set the scene for a momentous year of legal downloads. Later in the year the download chart will merge with the singles chart and perhaps we will once again have a singles chart we can be proud off. (I'd better stop there before I start off on a tirade about the poor quality of the music on the singles chart!)
Legal music downloads are definitely here to stay despite what a few die-hards such as myself may say. If the choice available from these sites increases and the price continues to fall (now down to 69p from some sites) you never know, I may even pay to download a track myself.
posted by David Keates at 1:47 am
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