A Short History of the Download!
Music Downloading Music downloading has come a long way since Boston college student Shawn Fanning programmed a global music sharing service in his dorm-room in 1999. Napster originally involved users uploading their own music collections onto a server hosted by Napster and other users downloading those tracks from the server onto their home computers and using them as they see fit. Obviously, music fans on the receiving end loved this because it meant all the free music they could ever want. Of course, the record companies and artists did not like this because it meant that instead of people buying their CDs, they would download them off Napster.
Heavy metal band Metallica decided to take action against this by suing individual users of Napster, but this didn't do much but get a lot of people to hate them and not buy their CDs (of course, they would just download them anyway). In 2000, Napster was successfully sued and shut down by a group effort from record companies and artists. just when the record companies thought it was back to business as usual, three young men from Estonia created Kazaa, a peer-to-peer file sharing service in which every user was a server when they were online.
This meant people were downloading off each other rather than a central server. The legal complication behind this was that the record companies could not sue the Kazaa network and shut the whole thing down, because the files were hosted by millions of people worldwide. That meant the record companies would have had to work together with the governments of over three continents to arrest millions of people which, frankly, wasn't going to happen.
In 2003, the RIAA put the fear of God into the users of Kazaa by suing 261 people for potentially about £100,000 per track, yet a lot of the cases were settled for about £3000. This earned the RIAA a lot of controversy, mainly because one of the people sued was a 12-year-old girl who claimed she thought what she was doing was legal because her mother was paying for the (equally illegal) Kazaa subscription service. However unpopular this made the RIAA, it successfully made people think twice before downloading music and showed them that anyone could be sued, even if they were 12 years old. For those who decide to play it safe and keep legal, the new wave of legal download sites (including the new legal version of Napster) are becoming very popular.
In fact, in a recent survey of about 2,200 people in The Raft showed that 3.8% of people are downloading 1-5 tracks per month off legal download sites. This may not seem like a very big percentage, but music downloading is still in it's early stages. The most popular legal download sites at the moment include Napster (£9.95 per month for unlimited 'tethered' downloads which cannot be burnt to CD or put onto an MP3 player, and 99p per track to 'un-tether' them), iTunes (80-99p per track) and My Coke Music (80-99p per track).
The different services all have their specialist pull factors. For example Napster has the biggest music collection out of all the networks and lets you download as many tracks as you want for a monthly fee, provided you don't want to move them around. |
About Petrol Records
About Petrol Records
