The Controversy Over Music Downloading Essays -- Internet Online Commu

The Controversy Over Music Downloading Imagine you are driving down the road, listening to the radio, and a new song begins to play that catches your attention. You decide, after listening to this song, that you enjoy it, so you listen carefully to the DJ to hear what the name of the song is and whom it is by. When you get home, you log on to your favorite music-downloading site and download the song that you heard earlier in the day. Would you consider yourself stealing and disobeying copyright laws? Many artists believe that people who are downloading their music are stealing from them and they are striving to stop it. On the other hand, many artists and music lovers are happy with the new technology of music downloading. I believe that there is a way to reach a happy medium in-between these two groups to solve this problem. With a few website modifications, along with some minor changes in the music world, we will be able to leave this problem behind us. Thanks to today’s technologies, music can be compacted into MP3s and sent all across the Internet. MP3s use about a tenth of the memory that CD format does. This makes MP3s extremely popular on the Internet. Being of a small size, downloading speeds are faster, and hard drives can store ten times the amount of songs it previously could. Digital music is also popular because of its perfect reproducibility. Analog music can be copied, but the more copies you make, the worse the quality gets. Unlike analog music, digital music can be copied over and over again. Digital music, such as CDs and MP3s are made up of bits, which are 1s and 0s. You can infinitely copy 1s and 0s correctly, but imagine trying to copy something like the graph of ... ...ter the search of a song will be one to take you directly to the artist’s website. This will allow users to find out more about the artist. While on the website, a fan could find out that a band or artist is coming to a city near them, and they could buy tickets to the show, or just find some merchandise that they like. This would profit the artist who was complaining about having their music stolen from them. Although the opinions vary of the existence of free music, one thing is for sure; something needs to be done about it. Going around suing and having the government attempt to shut down technological advances is not the way to handle this problem. I believe that my solution, may not be the greatest, but it is a step in the right direction. The Internet is a powerful tool and each artist should be able to use it how it best suits them.