Legal VS Illegal Music Downloading

Legal Downloading sites:

iTunes Store, Tune App, Napster, Zune Marketplace, Amazon MP3, Nokia Music Store, TuneTribe, Kazaa and eMusic.

The websites above are well known legal music websites that allow you to purchase music from them. The types of downloads on these websites are encoded with digital rights management which means copies of the song can not be made. The times online said that "The internet is the big battleground. Piracy remains rampant, with more than seven million illegal file-sharers in Britain alone. Shops such as Woolworths and Zaavi have collapsed, further depressing CD sales. Albums, which bring in the most amount of revenue to record labels, have been hit by digital websites such as Apple’s iTunes that allow users to “cherry-pick” their favourite singles. Falling revenue has had an inevitable effect on talent." An example of this is artists such a Lily Allen who has stopped her music career due to the increasing numbers of illegal downloading. Artists put in a lot of hard work,effort and revenue into making songs for the majority of the public to just download the songs for free. This means being a song artist does not pay as much as it used to when illegal music downloads were unheard of. Artists will now generally rely on their physical sales of singles and albums and their music tours.

Technological change is occuring very quickly in the world and the times online says "“By 2012 half of all telephones will be smart phones and we’ll see impressive growth in ‘access’ music services such as Spotify,” Mr Ek (who owns 47% of the music site spotify) said. “The overall industry will be worth $40 to $50 billion dollars and, if you look at how internet companies develop, there will be only a couple of really dominant players. We hope to be one of them.” New technology now means its easier to share and download music at a fast rate. By 2012 the industry is said to have lost £1.2 billion pounds. The digital market is growing strongly but not at a sufficient pace to offset the damage being done by piracy. Although there is a lot of downloading it does not necessarily mean a 'lost sale' because when you can not find the song to download freely the public often will then turn to buy the item. It also widens the range of audiences that listen to there music as everyone can access this music for free but only some may be able to purchase the songs.

Illegal Music Downloading Sites:
LimeWire, FrostWire, Bearshare, 4 shared

In 2010 Lime wire was finally shut down after a 4 year court battle in the US. It was said to have intentionally caused a "massive scale of infringement" by permitting the sharing of thousands of copyrighted works by its 50 million monthly users.

This link shows the extent of how many illegal music downloaders there are in the UK.
BBC news article on Illegal Music Downloading
'Around 7.7m people have illegally downloaded music this year, according to research commissioned by the British record industry's trade association.'
The statement above shows just how many people are illegally downlading music. The music industry suffers extremely from these types of downloads and costs them millions.
The amount of people downloading music is getting out of control and it is very hard to try to catch everyone committing the crime. It has been said that warning letters may be sent out to those being caught in order for them to stop downloading. However it is hard to identify the culprit as they may be in a household with other computer users.