Tuesday, May 5, 2009

online music store

An online music store is an online business which sells audio files, usually music, on a per-song and/or subscription basis. The Internet's first free high fidelity online music archive of downloadable songs was the Internet Underground Music Archive. IUMA was started by Rob Lord, Jeff Patterson and Jon Luini from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993 The realization of the market for these services grew widespread around the time of Napster, a music and file sharing service created by Shawn Fanning that made a major impact on the Internet scene during the year 2000. Some services have tethered downloads, meaning that playing songs requires an active membership.

  • Follows copyright laws.
  • More consistent and higher quality meta-data, because the entering of the meta-data is more centralized and done by groups with financial interests.
  • Music download companies are more accountable to users than creators of file-sharing programs
  • Centralized repository of music makes it easier to find the songs you want.
  • Notably, Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs claimed in his introduction of the iTunes Store that file swappers get paid less than minimum wage for the work required to download audio.