Shared Music

Shared Music

It's something every person has been through before. Your favorite artist or band is playing a concert in your hometown. You purchase tickets and head down to your local music store to get their latest album. It contains fourteen of their recent new songs and costs in the vicinity of seventeen to twenty-five dollars. And those tickets go for about thirty-five dollars a piece. Doesn't it seem like the price of good music is taking a toll on your wallet? I would certainly agree, and because of that, like millions of other American teenagers and adults alike, I often turn to the internet for help. But isn't the downloading of music an illegal act of piracy? Not necessarily.

Webster's Dictionary defines the term Piracy as "The unauthorized use or reproduction of copyrighted or patented material." By this definition, the simple task of downloading music from a file-sharing program on the Internet is not an infraction of the law. In fact, if you are downloading music from the Internet for personal use only, this is still considered legal.

The problem is, however, most songs downloaded online have the potential to be shared and distributed. To share a file means that you allow anyone in the world access to view and download any file on your computer freely, with the concept that you have the same access to anyone else's files world-wide over a File-Transfer Protocol (FTP) or Person-to-Person (P2P) Network. If you do not share the music files you download over these networks, or use them in any way other than your personal enjoyment in your room or car stereo system, then you are not breaking the law. The easiest way to solve this problem is simply to not share your music. By following the instructions in the software used to download music files, a person can easily keep their music from being accessed by people and staying safe from legal trouble.

Another reason I believe in downloading music from the Internet is because studies that have been done recently have shown that album sales are not the top-grossing income for artists. In fact, in most cases, artists only receive about 1% of record sales. The rest goes straight to the record companies. While the money lost from these sales may be bad for the companies, I do not feel that the downloading takes away from a specific artist's income. This is made up in high-priced ticket sales,