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The Advantages and Disadvantages of Music Distribution over the Internet

Throughout the ages, people have shared the love of making and listening to music. Music has the ability to enhance our emotions and add interest to our lives, so it is little wonder that we are willing to pay to listen to our favourite songs and that the music industry is one of the largest entertainment industries. In contrast, the Internet is a developing tool and resource we have only been familiar with for the past two decades, but now affects the lives of billions. Even though music has been on the Internet for five or so years, it is already recognised as one of the primary reasons for people to get online

The distribution of music on the Internet has become extremely simple, and with the advances in audio formats together with increasing Internet speed, it is now possible to download not only songs but entire albums. However the combination of music and the Internet has caused a great controversy. Simplistically, the issue of Internet music distribution concerns three groups of people… the Internet users who download music, the organizations and individuals who distribute music through Internet sites, and lastly the artists and their record companies, record manufactures and music stores.

As the Internet users generally argue, Internet music distribution has numerous advantages. Even novice Internet users can now access the virtually any songs ever written in a matter of seconds. This can all be done from the personal computer and is far more practical for people than the previous means. The Internet features virtually every types of music that exists and every artist providing the means for people to broaden their musical horizons. It provides people who live in remote places a change to actually purchase music from a virtual music community and also the opportunity for all people to listen to a song before the decision to purchase it. The Internet is especially good news for the less famous artists who most likely can afford any other means to expose their music to the public.

On the other hand though, as the famous artists and their loyal defenders are arguing, this form of music distribution has plenty of disadvantages. For starters it has been estimated that over eighty percent of all music downloaded is done so illegally. Unfortunately as it seems, illegal downloading of songs from the Internet has turned into a fairly casual and frequent type of crime, and a recent poll shows that most young people believe lying and speeding to be worse offences. One of the reasons for this is that it has never really been punished, and it has become difficult for ordinary people to tell the difference between right and wrong regarding this issue. However it all comes down to copyright law, as the body of exclusive rights protecting artist’s work from being copied without their authorization. The real issue is that they are not receiving their royalties, because obviously when you download a song for free neither the artists or the record companies receive a cent.

Perhaps it all happened so fast it has taken this long to react, but recently artist have been lashing out in attempts to sue music distributing and file-swapping Internet sites, in one case demanding a hundred thousand for each song illegally copied. On one hand we have the argument that it is wrong to base and industry on theft like this, but on the other it is the people performing the illegal acts that should be punished and not the technology. The publicity and media attention from these court cases seems to be making the artist less popular, but is actually beneficial to the Internet sites who subscribe to the point of view that even bad publicity is good publicity… and their success is proof of that.

If I were asked to give an opinion, I would say that in a perfect world all music should be free. I might have been sympathetic toward the artists, but I can recognise that their concerns are based largely on their own greed. The reality of this situation is that Internet music is making music in general more popular, and figures have proven that there has been no decline in music sales at all. It is obvious to me that not every song downloaded for free would otherwise have been bought, and if anything this is a form of free publicity, which does not affect the already excessive income of famous artists at all. Personally I see this issue similar to the issue of the Internet itself. Was it wrong for us to create the means for people to act so illegally and not get caught, or do the benefits of the Internet outweigh the disadvantages? It doesn’t really matter now because it’s already too late to turn back. Our responsibility now is to deal with the situation and force the law to actually catch up and adapt to illegal music distribution over the Internet.