Downloading Music

A music download is a song or album available for downloading on the Internet. Downloading music first became popular with file sharing technologies, with people breaking copyright laws by not paying for any of it. However, it was claimed that this was hurting the music industry, and a series of law suits led to many of these networks being closed down. However, those who support such technologies argue that the music industry said the same thing about recordable tapes and CDs, and even when recorded music came out as before then artists got their money through live performance, and that the industry should adapt to the advancements in technology.

The second phase of music downloading was the online music store, whereby songs could be downloaded at a price. In 2003, iTunes saw the popularity of legal digital downloads skyrocket. Other online websites include URGE, Napster and MSN's Music store. The sales of downloaded music has now surpassed the sales of 'physical copies' in some countries; this has been indicated in the UK where Crazy by Gnarls Barkley reached the top spot in the UK Singles Chart based on download sales alone

Some artists allow their songs to be downloaded from their websites, often as a short preview or a low quality sampling. Others have embeded services in their sites that allow purchases of their singles or albums, as demonstrated by Metallica's official website. In addition to this and to music stores, illegal downloading programs or websites such as limewire, kazaa, bearlite, and many others are very popular.

iTUNES:



iTunes can connect to the iTunes Store (provided an internet connection is present) in order to download purchased digital music, music videos, television shows, iPod games, audiobooks, various podcasts, and feature length films.

With iTunes, users are able to organize their music into playlists within one or more libraries, edit file information, record compact discs, copy files to a digital audio player, purchase music and videos through its built-in music store, download podcasts, back up songs onto a CD or DVD, run a visualizer to display graphical effects in time to the music, and encode music into a number of different audio formats.

iTunes 1.0 also came with support for the Kerbango Internet radio tuner service, giving iTunes users a selection of some of the more popular online radio streams available.

LIMEWIRE:

LimeWire is a peer-to-peer file sharing client, which locates and transfers files. Limewire is free software. It also encourages the user to pay a small fee, which will then give the user access to LimeWire Pro.