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A digital music store is a business that sells
digital audio files of
music recordings over the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
. Customers gain ownership of a license to use the files, in contrast to a
music streaming service
A music streaming service is a type of streaming media service that focuses primarily on music, and sometimes other forms of digital audio content such as podcasts. These services are usually subscription-based services allowing users to stream d ...
, where they listen to recordings without gaining ownership. Customers pay either for each recording or on a
subscription basis.
Online
In computer technology and telecommunications, online indicates a state of connectivity and offline indicates a disconnected state. In modern terminology, this usually refers to an Internet connection, but (especially when expressed "on line" o ...
music stores generally also offer partial streaming previews of songs, with some songs even available for full length listening. They typically show a picture of the album art or of the performer or band for each song. Some online music stores also sell recorded speech files, such as
podcast
A podcast is a program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. For example, an episodic series of digital audio or video files that a user can download to a personal device to listen to at a time of their choosin ...
s, and video files of
movie
A film also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere ...
s.
History
Early years
The first free,
high-fidelity online music archive of downloadable songs on the Internet was the
Internet Underground Music Archive
The Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) was an organization that provided a venue for unsigned artists to share their music and communicate with their audience. IUMA is widely recognized as the birthplace of on-line music. IUMA's goal was to ...
(IUMA), which was started by Rob Lord, Jeff Patterson and Jon Luini from the
University of California, Santa Cruz
The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of ...
in 1993.
Sony Music Entertainment Japan launched the first digital music store in Japan on 20 December 1999, entitled Bitmusic, which initially focused on
A-side
The A-side and B-side are the two sides of phonograph records and cassettes; these terms have often been printed on the labels of two-sided music recordings. The A-side usually features a recording that its artist, producer, or record company ...
s of singles released by Japanese domestic musicians.
The realization of the market for downloadable music grew widespread with the development of
Napster, a music and
file sharing
File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include r ...
service created by
Shawn Fanning
Shawn Fanning (born November 22, 1980) is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and angel investor. He developed Napster, one of the first popular peer-to-peer ("P2P") file sharing platforms, in 1999. The popularity of Napster was widespr ...
that made a major impact on the Internet scene in 2000. Some services have ''tethered'' downloads, meaning that playing songs requires an active membership. Napster was founded as a pioneering
peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing Internet service that emphasized sharing audio files, typically music, encoded in
MP3
MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...
format. The original company ran into legal difficulties over
copyright infringement
Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, s ...
, ceased operations and was eventually acquired by
Roxio
Roxio is an American software company specializing in developing consumer digital media products. Its product line includes tools for setting up digital media projects, media conversion software and content distribution systems. The company formed ...
. In its second incarnation Napster became an online music store until
Rhapsody acquired it from
Best Buy on 1 December 2011. Later companies and projects successfully followed its P2P file sharing example such as
Gnutella
Gnutella is a peer-to-peer network protocol. Founded in 2000, it was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model.
In June 2005, Gnutella's population was 1.81 million compute ...
,
Freenet
Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to keep and deliver information, and has a suite of free software for publishing and communicating on the Web ...
,
Kazaa, Bearshare, and many others. Some services, like
LimeWire
LimeWire was a free peer-to-peer file sharing client for Windows, MacOS, Linux and Solaris. Created by Mark Gorton in 2000, it was most prominently a tool used for the download and distribution of pirated materials, particularly pirated mus ...
,
Scour,
Grokster
Grokster Ltd. was a privately owned software company based in Nevis, West Indies that created the Grokster peer-to-peer file-sharing client in 2001 that used the FastTrack protocol. Grokster Ltd. was rendered extinct in late 2005 by the United St ...
,
Madster
Madster (initially called Aimster) was a peer-to-peer file sharing service. It was released in Napster's wake in August 2000 shut down in December 2002 as a result of a lawsuit by the Recording Industry Association of America.
Origin
According t ...
, and
eDonkey2000
eDonkey2000 (nicknamed "ed2k") was a peer-to-peer file sharing application developed by US company MetaMachine (Jed McCaleb and Sam Yagan), using the Multisource File Transfer Protocol. This client supports both the eDonkey2000 network and the ...
, were brought down or changed due to similar circumstances.
In 2000,
Factory Records
Factory Records was a Manchester-based British independent record label founded in 1978 by Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus.
The label featured several important acts on its roster, including Joy Division, New Order, A Certain Ratio, the Duru ...
entrepreneur
Tony Wilson
Anthony Howard Wilson (20 February 1950 – 10 August 2007) was a British record label owner, radio and television presenter, nightclub manager, impresario and a journalist for Granada Television, the BBC and Channel 4.
As a co-founder o ...
and his business partners launched an early online music store, Music33, which sold MP3s for 33
pence per song.
The major record labels eventually decided to launch their own online stores, allowing them more direct control over costs and pricing and more control over the presentation and packaging of songs and albums.
Sony Music Entertainment
Sony Music Entertainment (SME), also known as simply Sony Music, is an American multinational music company. Being owned by the parent conglomerate Sony Group Corporation, it is part of the Sony Music Group, which is owned by Sony Entertainmen ...
's service did not do as well as was hoped. Many consumers felt the service was difficult to navigate and use. Sony's pricing of US$3.50 per song track also discouraged many early adopters of the service. Furthermore, as ''
MP3 Newswire Founded in 1998, the same year as MP3.com, MP3 Newswire is the oldest active news site devoted to digital media technology. Notable for its series of essays that chronicled the rise of digital music and the Internet’s acrimonious relationship wit ...
'' pointed out in its review of the service, users were actually only renting the tracks for that $3.50, because the patron did not own the audio file. After a certain point the files expired and could not be played again without repurchase. The service quickly failed.
Undaunted, the record industry tried again.
Universal Music Group
Universal Music Group N.V. (often abbreviated as UMG and referred to as just Universal Music) is a Dutch– American multinational music corporation under Dutch law. UMG's corporate headquarters are located in Hilversum, Netherlands and its ...
and Sony Music Entertainment teamed up with a service called Duet, later renamed
pressplay.
EMI
EMI Group Limited (originally an initialism for Electric and Musical Industries, also referred to as EMI Records Ltd. or simply EMI) was a British Transnational corporation, transnational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate founded in March 1 ...
,
AOL/Time Warner and
Bertelsmann Music Group teamed up with MusicNet. Again, both services struggled, hampered by high prices and heavy limitations on how downloaded files could be used once paid for.
In the end, consumers chose instead to download music using illegal, free file sharing programs, which many consumers felt were more convenient and easier to use.
Non-major label services like
eMusic
eMusic is an online music and audiobook store that operates by subscription. In exchange for a monthly subscription eMusic users can download a fixed number of MP3 tracks per month. eMusic was established in 1998, is headquartered in New York C ...
,
Cductive and Listen.com (now Rhapsody) sold the music of independent labels and artists. The demand for
digital audio downloading skyrocketed after the launch of
Apple's iTunes Store
The iTunes Store is a digital media store operated by Apple Inc. It opened on April 28, 2003, as a result of Steve Jobs' push to open a digital marketplace for music. As of April 2020, iTunes offered 60 million songs, 2.2 million apps, 25,00 ...
(then called
iTunes Music Store) in April 2003 and the creation of portable music and
digital audio player
A portable media player (PMP) (also including the related digital audio player (DAP)) is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. The data is typically stored o ...
s such as the
iPod. These players enabled music fans to carry their music with them, wherever they went.
Amazon
Amazon most often refers to:
* Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology
* Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin
* Amazon River, in South America
* Amazon (company), an American multinational technolog ...
launched its
Amazon MP3
Amazon Music (previously Amazon MP3) is a music streaming platform and online music store operated by Amazon. Launched in public beta on September 25, 2007, in January 2008 it became the first music store to sell music without digital rights m ...
service for the US in September 2007, expanding it gradually to most countries where Amazon operates.
Rise
An increasing number of new services appeared in the 2000s that enabled musicians to sell their music
directly to fans without an intermediary. These type of services usually use
e-commerce
E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain managem ...
-enabled
web widgets
A web widget is a web page or web application that is embedded as an element of a host web page but which is substantially independent of the host page, having limited or no interaction with the host. A web widget commonly provides users of the ...
that embed into many types of web pages. This turns each web page into the musician's own online music store. Furthermore, there had been a boom in "boutique" music stores that cater to specific audiences.
On October 10, 2007, English rock band
Radiohead released the album ''
In Rainbows
''In Rainbows'' is the seventh studio album by the English rock band Radiohead. It was self-released on 10 October 2007 as a pay-what-you-want download, followed by a physical release internationally through XL Recordings and in North America ...
'' as a download. Listeners were allowed to purchase the album for whatever price they wanted to pay, legally allowing them to download the album for free. About one-third of people who downloaded the album paid nothing, with the average price paid being £4. After three months online the album was taken down by the band and released on compact disc (CD). , the largest online music store was the
iTunes Store
The iTunes Store is a digital media store operated by Apple Inc. It opened on April 28, 2003, as a result of Steve Jobs' push to open a digital marketplace for music. As of April 2020, iTunes offered 60 million songs, 2.2 million apps, 25,00 ...
, with around 80% of the market. On 3 April 2008, the iTunes Store surpassed
Wal-Mart
Walmart Inc. (; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount department stores, and grocery stores from the United States, headquarter ...
as the biggest music retailer in the United States, a milestone in the music industry as it was the first time in history that an online music retailer exceeded those of physical music formats (e.g.,
record shop
A record shop or record store is a retail outlet that sells recorded music. In the late 19th century and the early 20th century, record shops only sold gramophone records, but over the 20th century, record shops sold the new formats that were ...
s selling CDs).
In the early 2010s, online music stores—especially iTunes—experienced a marked increase in sales. Consumer spending shifted away from the purchase of CDs in favor of purchasing albums from online music stores, or more commonly, purchasing individual songs. The iTunes platform has been the main reason for this shift, as it originally sold every song in its library for 99 cents. Historically, albums would be sold for about five times the cost of a single, but iTunes was selling every song for a tenth of the price of an album. However, in order to increase album sales, iTunes instituted "Complete My Album", which offered a discounted price on the full album when a consumer had already purchased one or more songs. Furthermore, with the rising popularity of
Cyber Monday
Cyber Monday is a marketing term for e-commerce transactions on the Monday after Thanksgiving in the United States. It was created by retailers to encourage people to shop online. The term was coined by Ellen Davis of the National Retail Fe ...
, online music stores have further gained ground over other music distribution sources.
iTunes rolled out an Instant Gratification (instant grat) service, in which some individual tracks or
bonus track
An album is a collection of audio recordings issued on compact disc (CD), vinyl, audio tape, or another medium such as digital distribution. Albums of recorded sound were developed in the early 20th century as individual 78 rpm records co ...
s were made available to customers who have pre-ordered albums. The instant-grat tracks have changed the criteria for the UK
Official Charts
The Official Charts (legal name: The Official UK Charts Company Limited) is a British inter-professional organization that compiles various "official" record charts in the United Kingdom, Ireland and France.
In the United Kingdom, its charts inc ...
's singles. In 2013,
David Bowie
David Robert Jones (8 January 194710 January 2016), known professionally as David Bowie ( ), was an English singer-songwriter and actor. A leading figure in the music industry, he is regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the ...
's "
Where Are We Now?
"Where Are We Now?" is a song by English musician David Bowie. Recorded in secret between September and October 2011 at the Magic Shop in New York City, it was released by ISO and Columbia Records as the lead single of his 25th studio album '' ...
" was not allowed to chart because it was a pre-order for the album ''
The Next Day
''The Next Day'' is the 25th studio album by English musician David Bowie, released in March 2013. It was his first studio release in ten years, having retreated from public view after his 2004 heart attack. Co-produced by Bowie and longtime c ...
'', but Official Charts later ruled that effective February 10, 2013, certain instant grats could be allowed to appear in the Top 40. Instant grats have also been offered on other online music stores including Amazon and Spotify.
Compared to file sharing
Much controversy surrounds
file sharing
File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include r ...
, so many of these points are disputed.
Advantages of legal online stores
* The sale of licensed content adheres to
copyright law
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...
s
* More consistent and higher-quality metadata, because the entering of the metadata is more centralized and done with more oversight.
* Music download companies are more accountable to users than creators of file-sharing programs
* A 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
The iTunes Store is a digital media store operated by Apple Inc. It opened on April 28, 2003, as a result of Steve Jobs' push to open a digital marketplace for music. As of April 2020, iTunes offered 60 million songs, 2.2 million apps, 25,00 ...
that downloading from file-sharers is theoretically working for less than minimum wage - "By spending an hour of your time to save less than four dollars, he calculated, 'you're working for less than minimum wage!'".
Disadvantages of online stores
* Many major online music stores only offer music in one audio format.
* Most online music stores sell music encoded in a
lossy file format, compared to an audio CD. For the most part, music that is sold in lossy MP3 format is not sold at higher bit rate encoding.
* Few online music stores offer music in lossless, metadata-enabled formats such as
FLAC or
ALAC, but instead stick to
WAV
Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave") is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is the main format used on Microsoft Wind ...
files in which no metadata can generally be embedded.
AIFF
Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is an audio file format standard used for storing sound data for personal computers and other electronic audio devices. The format was developed by Apple Inc. in 1988 based on Electronic Arts' Interchange File ...
files with metadata are offered but in larger size files than FLAC or ALAC without advantage in sound quality. In contrast, lossless rips of CDs in FLAC format are widely available on the web for illegal downloading.
* Some stores use
Digital Rights Management technology, which limits the use of music files on certain devices. The restrictions vary between different services, and sometimes even between different songs from the same service.
*Online stores charge for downloading songs and other content, whereas illegal file sharing does not have any fees (although illegal song downloaders may face fines and prosecution in some jurisdictions and illegal files may contain
computer viruses)
Internet radio
Online music stores receive competition from online radio, as well as file sharing. Online radio is the free distribution of webcasts on the Internet via streaming. Listeners can create customizable "stations" based on a genre, artists, or song of their choice. Notable Internet Radio service providers are
Pandora,
Last FM
Last.fm is a music website founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. Using a music recommender system called "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of the tracks the user listens to, e ...
and recently
Spotify
Spotify (; ) is a proprietary Swedish audio streaming and media services provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. It is one of the largest music streaming service providers, with over 456 million monthly active us ...
, with Pandora being the largest. Pandora holds 52% of the market share in Internet radio, with over 53 million registered users and almost one billion stations from which users can choose.
See also
*
Comparison of digital music stores
Digital music stores sell copies of digital audio, for example in MP3 and WAV file formats. Unlike music streaming services, which typically charge a monthly subscription fee to stream digital audio, digital music stores download songs to the cu ...
*
Music industry
*
Open Music Model
*
InMusic
*
Unsigned band web
References
External links
Off Book: The Evolution of Music Online Documentary produced by
Off Book (web series)
''Off Book'' is a web series on digital culture and art created for PBS by Kornhaber Brown, a Webby award-winning production studio that creates web series, videos, and motion graphics. The series has been viewed more than six million times, an ...
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