 Ever
since Thomas Edison cobbled together the first phonograph and sang
“Mary Had a Little Lamb” into it, people have been
seeking new ways to download music.
For many years – decades even – the only way to
download music was to make a copy of a vinyl record. Eventually, with
the advent of tapes, people began to make copies of vinyl records onto
cassette tapes. Still later came CDs; first they were strictly for
recordings, but eventually writeable CDs came along, and people could
burn their own albums.
Finally came the Internet, and the age of truly being able to download
music was born. At first, the downloading of songs was not at easy
task; what with modems working off of the standard phone line. Their
download speed was appallingly slow; so trying to download even a short
song could take ten to twenty minutes or more!
One of the first websites that was available to download music was
Napster, but there was one little problem with it – it was
illegal. People would take music they had; convert the songs to what is
known as an mp3 file and post them on the site. An mp3 file is a type
of sound file that is easier to upload and download. So other people
could then download music files from Napster; convert them back to a
standard music file (known as a WAV or wave file) and then record them
onto a CD. Well, of course, the music industry was not pleased with the
idea of people being able to download music for free. After all, doing
that deprived them – and the recording artists – of
their royalties.
There followed litigation and numerous court hearings, which eventually
resulted in the closing down of Napster and other similar websites. It
took a while, but Nappster finally came back online as a paying web
site. Then other companies followed suite, until there were soon a
plethora of companies offering songs to download. Also, as the
technology improved, the time to download music got shorter and
shorter. Nowadays, with DSL and other high-speed connections, you can
download music in as little as a few minutes for each song.
Then there is the question of cost. As all of the current (legal) web
sites pay royalties to the recording companies, you have to pay for the
songs you download. In general, there are several ways of doing this.
With some websites, you pay a fixed amount for each piece of music you
download. In some instances, you can buy a package deal: a certain
number of songs for a certain amount, or a set number of songs per week
(or month). Beyond that, some companies even let you pay one lump sum
fee to allow you to download music all you want.
So, the technology of recording music has evolved and changed a great
deal since it was first created, more than a century ago. Where once
you needed a stereo to listen to your favorite album that you bought at
a store, now you can download music from a website, put it on your iPod
(or similar device), and listen to any songs in any order you want. We
can only guess at how people will download music in the years to come.
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