Music

A recent study at the B.I. Norwegian School of Management revealed, people that download music illegally also account for a large percent of online retail music sales (Brownlee, John). As someone who is an advent user of both Apple's iTunes and various BitTorrent clients, I can agree with the conclusion made from the survey. There are some artists that are not available through iTunes for various reasons, so users have to search elsewhere for such music. If I can't find it on iTunes I rarely choose to buy the music but instead search for and download the file at no charge. There are also times when copyright laws prevent users from buying music online that is from other countries. For instance, Missy Higgins is a singer and songwriter from Australia, on the US iTunes store there are about one hundred music files available for her. However on the Australian iTunes music store there are close to two hundred and fifty music files available for her. Living in the US and having registered my iTunes account with a US address, I am not allowed to purchase music from the Australian iTunes store. Instead I find it online illegally, as I cannot purchase it from any other US based store because of copyright laws. The music industry wonders why they lose money to illegal downloads, but they don’t realize the same copyright laws keeping various artists' music from being shared illegally, are also keeping It from being purchased legally.

I love Missy Higgins's music and I take every chance I get to legally purchase everything she creates, but when I am not allowed to purchase her music because of where I live, I do anything I can to obtain it. There have also been times in which a friend of mine has told me to check out a certain artist's music. Usually I'll check iTunes and listen to a sample of the music and if it sounds interesting I'll buy the song. Other times I buy entire albums on iTunes because of one or two songs I liked. Obtaining everything illegally doesn't help the industry, but being able to share music online that has already been purchased helps spread a particular artist's music to people who may not otherwise be able to obtain it. I also obtain a lot of my music directly from compact discs my friends own. I must also say, after seeing Missy Higgins for the first time during her performance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, if not for the internet, I never would have been able to learn as much about her and discover all the music she has to offer. Music downloaded from iTunes used to contain built in copyright protection that prevented those files from being used on other computers and other users iTunes programs; however, this past year iTunes stopped encoding their music and video files with copyright protection allowing for the files downloaded on iTunes to be used on different computers and with different iTunes user accounts.