Digital Songs: Free Versus Paid
The annual global music market is currently worth over five billion songs and garners about $2 billion in revenue. Only 500 million of these involved digital sales.
There are several stores for online music that allows either totally free mp3 music downloads or allows sales of digital music with over a million songs in their databases. For instance, iTunes has 8 million songs, Amazon MP3 has 5 million songs, iMesh has 4 million songs that are to be paid for and another 15 million free songs, and eMusic has 2 million songs. Other leading players in the online music segment include Rhapsody, Napster, Walmart Music, Zune Marketplace, GoMusic and several others.
In addition to totally free mp3 downloads and online sales, there is a third category of digital sharing that is widely prevalent on the internet. This refers to peer-to-peer sites like Kazaa, MP3 Xtreme, BearShare and Torrent. Several of these modes of transfer of songs have certain copyright and legal issues that are yet to be fully resolved.
The above merely serves to stress the reasons for the tremendous popularity that the music sites enabling free mp3 music downloads have gained in recent times. Since there is a huge demand among users for free mp3 downloads, websites are rushing to supply it, and profit from the mp3 downloads in various associated ways. Music lovers perceive in such sites a means of access to an endless store of the latest songs from star artists that they can download without any hassles, payment or delay.