Free Downloading

Many people believe that downloading free music is stealing money from record companies and artists, but it may be putting some more money into the pockets of the artists than people think. There also seems to be some confusion as to what is actually illegal and what is not illegal. Sources like Napster are in fact legal. Because the original file was purchased and somebody uploaded it, these services are protected under law. These web sites are known as file sharing sources or peer to peer sharing programs, web sites. What you may not know is that, for every song you download from a peer to peer sharing source such as Torrentscan.com, you can actually upload a certain amount of the song after you have downloaded the song. This is refereed to as seeding. The truth is that seeding, is not actually illegal, as long as you are not making any money by selling the mp3 file. Napster's attorneys say that finding and downloading copyrighted songs for free is protected by law, as long as Napster members are not making any money themselves.

Free music downloading can serve as a great promotional tool for any musical group. Artists may be actually making more money if people are downloading their musi. If someone is downloading an artists music they would be more likely to tell their friends and go to concerts. People are able to sample music easily and then will go out and purchase the CD because they like what they hear. This is much easier than going to a store and listening to a sample of the band's music. People are getting exposed to new music much faster which means artists and record companies will be making more money. This is an excellent source of exposure for the lesser known or underground bands or musicians. It is really tough for unknown artists to break in to the big record companies. According to a survey done by a professor at Wharton School of Business, seventy percent of Napster members polled, reported to have used the service to sample music before going out and buying it. A study was done by Harvard students that showed that free music downloading had no direct impact on music record sales or profit of record companies. In the past year the amount of downloads continued to increase but so did record sales.

Most people that are downloading music from the web today would not actually go out and buy the song. So record companies cannot claim it as lost money. The amount of money that the artist receives from a bought song is only a fraction of a cent. The most amount of money that an artist receives is from concerts and merchandise sales, and ticket sales and merchandise sales are more likely to go up with more people downloading music.

Many bands such as Wilco even encourage the free downloading of their music. Wilco's front man Jeff Tweety said "We don't care download it, share it, just don't sell it".

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