I remember growing up in the 1970s. My friends and I would go to the record store to purchase a new 45 rpm record or a LP album from our favorite bands. We then would promptly rush home to listen to it, savoring every bit. Back then, there didn't seem to be so many bands out there, or genres for that matter either. Those band were our heroes and they seemed to be on top of the world, sporting fast cars, beautiful women, living in huge mansions, throwing outrageous party's, those guys were rich,living it up baby!!! They were making all kinds of money off all those record sales.

That was then,  and then along comes the internet. All of a sudden you don't need to go to the store to buy records or tapes, you can "download" your tunes off the internet, you don't even have to pay a dime, some thing they call file sharing. Its like when I was a kid and me or one of my friends who might have had a tape recorder would put together some tunes on a cassette tape and borrow it to each other, but of course we wanted it back after all we were sharing, not giving away. Today it's a breeze you can download as much as you want and keep it all for yourself...pretty cool right. Well, that's not what all the artists thought, after all that's how they earned their living, remember all those riches. Not any more, people were not buying  music anymore, they were stealing it, or were they? Legal or illegal, court battles raged on. One of the big ones was against an outfit calling themselves "napster" a web site allowing us to download as much music as our hard drives can hold. Something just was not right about this. Eventually the artists emerged victorious, and napster was shut down.

Well since then more web sites have popped up, some considered legal because they charge money for the music you download and of course the artists and record labels all get paid, others still insisting music should be free and offer their visitors a way to download for free ,using legal loopholes to protect themselves against liabilities, saying the music is for personal use only and that the individual is responsible as to what he or she does with it. They use "torrents" a type of compressed file that contains all the bits and pieces of what you want.You then need to use special software, all provided on the web as a separate download, key generators will unlock all the information contained in the files which will all need to be extracted, and sent to their destination on your computer, where you  be able to listen using some sort of media player. Or you can put the files on your portable music player, make unlimited copies on CDs, put them on flash drives, transport the files to more computers. Where does it all stop, who knows? Personally I prefer to purchase my music, I mean I do like the convenience that the internet has to offer, it makes it very easy to obtain my music and I don't have to find places to put all my records and tapes. There are many reputable vendors offering legal downloads for very reasonable prices. You can find some of them, like emusic, iTunes, napster, and rhapsody on shopmusicdvd.com. Oh well, so I guess that's how the internet changed the music industry. Well, you know what they say, you cant stop progress, but you sure can put up a fight.