Friday, January 23, 2009
Music Downloads from Legitimate WebsitesWriten by Tembi Renca
A lot of people like the sound of downloading decent quality music but are concerned about doing it illegally. There are a variety of reasons why downloading music is a good idea - you could do it in order to listen to one or two album tracks to see if it is worth buying the whole album. Downloading is also great because it is convenient - all you have to do is to wait to download the file. In some cases listening to the track stream is an option and this is instantaneous.
Where do we stand in the eyes of the law, if we decide to download music? Napster is the most famous case - the legal proceedings that brought down the original Napster made it clear that even peers who are not profiting in any way from the exchange of songs are falling foul of the law. Illegal P2P (peer to peer) still goes on, even though Napster no longer works in this way. The latest findings show that P2P users do not only fileshare material with a copyright, but also use it legitimately for offering easy access to their own files and photographs for friends, family and colleagues.
So it is clear - keeping legal means no free downloads of material that carries a copyright. That there are lots of people who continue regardless shows just how popular the practice is. Should you want to take advantage of the ease of the music download, there are legal ways to do so.
There are a variety of ways you can do it. With a decent connection such as broadband you will be able to get access to lots of great music from Internet Radio or from other web sites that play newly released albums - it often happens that the artist and record company has approved the streaming of their recently released albums. Streaming offers you the chance to listen to the album when it is playing but without getting your own copy downloaded. Closer to going to the store and listening to it on the headphones, but in the comfort of your home. Some useful sites to visit are MP3.com, Launch.com (a Yahoo site), search for Internet Radio via Google, or go to http://www.ytube.com. On these sites you can see and listen to music videos too.
But the reason many people download is because they want it for their MP3 players - they need the download. Some good pay sites are available that allow you to do this such as Macintosh's itunes at www.itunes.com. This is the leading site and it is compatible with any player, not just iPods. Each track will cost you 99 cents but it is great quality and the track is then your own.
Other sites are always fighting for this lucrative market, each offering similar but slightly different services. There are many that work on a monthly-fee basis rather than billing by track. And a new and slightly different concept is mercora (www.mercora.com). Here you pay a small monthly fee and share tracks - you broadcast your tracks (you can make like a DJ if you want) whilst you record the tracks broadcast by others. Mercora pays a fee for broadcast rights which makes it within the law.
The majority of these sites are offering trial periods for nothing. Sign up for the trial, grab some tunes, and then go with the site that works for you.
Copyright 2006 Tembi Renca. All rights reserved.
Tembi Renca's internet site FRWE Music Download Inc makes it easy for you to easily locate and download music on the Internet. For the latest downloads, and music download guidance visit her archive of articles: http://www.frwemusicdownload.com/articles/
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