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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 network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...
. 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 online 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 s ...
, where they listen to recordings without gaining ownership. Customers pay either for each recording or on a
subscription The subscription business model is a business model in which a customer must pay a recurring price at regular intervals for access to a product or service. The model was pioneered by publishers of books and periodicals in the 17th century. It ...
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 as "on lin ...
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 Radio program, program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. Typically, a podcast is an Episode, episodic series of digital audio Computer file, files that users can download to a personal device or str ...
s, and video files of
movie A film, also known as a movie or motion picture, is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, emotions, or atmosphere through the use of moving images that are generally, sinc ...
s.


History


Early years

The first free,
high-fidelity High fidelity (hi-fi or, rarely, HiFi) is the high-quality reproduction of sound. It is popular with audiophiles and home audio enthusiasts. Ideally, high-fidelity equipment has inaudible noise and distortion, and a flat (neutral, uncolored) f ...
online music archive of downloadable songs on the Internet was the Internet Underground Music Archive (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 university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of C ...
in 1993.
Sony Music Entertainment Japan , often abbreviated as SMEJ or simply SME, and also known as Sony Music Japan for short (stylized as ''SonyMusic''), is a Japanese music arm for Sony. Founded in 1968 as CBS/Sony, SMEJ is directly owned by Sony, Sony Group Corporation and is ...
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 vinyl records and cassettes, and the terms have often been printed on the labels of two-sided music recordings. The A-side of a single usually features a recording that its artist, producer, or ...
s of singles released by Japanese domestic musicians. The realization of the market for downloadable music grew widespread with the development of
Napster Napster was an American proprietary peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application primarily associated with digital audio file distribution. Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the platform originally launched on June 1, 1999. Audio shared ...
, 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 ...
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 file sharing, peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing platforms, in 1999. The populari ...
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 under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...
format. The original company ran into legal difficulties over
copyright infringement Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of Copyright#Scope, works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the c ...
, 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 form ...
. In its second incarnation Napster became an online music store until Rhapsody acquired it from
Best Buy Best Buy Co., Inc. is an American multinational consumer electronics retailer headquartered in Richfield, Minnesota. Originally founded by Richard M. Schulze and James Wheeler in 1966 as an audio specialty store called Sound of Music, it was r ...
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 computer ...
,
Freenet Hyphanet (until mid-2023: Freenet) is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, Anonymity application, anonymous communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to keep and deliver information, and has a suite of free soft ...
,
Kazaa Kazaa Media Desktop ( ) (once stylized as "KaZaA", but later usually written "Kazaa") was a peer-to-peer file sharing application using the FastTrack protocol licensed by Joltid Ltd. and operated as Kazaa by Sharman Networks. Kazaa was subsequ ...
, 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 m ...
,
Scour Scour may refer to: Hydrodynamic processes * Hydrodynamic scour, the removal of sediment such as sand and silt from around an object by water flow ** Bridge scour, erosion of soil around at the base of a bridge pier or abutments via the flow ...
,
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 S ...
, Madster, 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. It supported both the eDonkey2000 network and the Over ...
, 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 (band), New Order, A Certain Ra ...
entrepreneur
Tony Wilson Anthony Howard Wilson (20 February 1950 – 10 August 2007) was a British record label owner, radio and television presenter, nightclub manager and impresario, and a journalist for Granada Television, the BBC and Channel 4. As a co-founder ...
and his business partners launched an early online music store, Music33, which sold MP3s for 33
pence A penny is a coin (: pennies) or a unit of currency (: pence) in various countries. Borrowed from the Carolingian denarius (hence its former abbreviation d.), it is usually the smallest denomination within a currency system. At present, it is t ...
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), commonly known as Sony Music, is an American multinational music company owned by Japanese conglomerate Sony Group Corporation. It is the recording division of Sony Music Group, with the other half being the ...
'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'' 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 Universal Music Group or Universal Music) is a Netherlands, Dutch–United States, American multinational Music industry, music corporation under Law of the Netherlands, ...
and Sony Music Entertainment teamed up with a service called Duet, later renamed pressplay.
EMI EMI Group Limited (formerly EMI Group plc until 2007; originally an initialism for Electric and Musical Industries, also referred to as EMI Records or simply EMI) was a British transnational conglomerate founded in March 1931 in London. At t ...
, AOL/Time Warner and
Bertelsmann Music Group Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) was a division of a German media company Bertelsmann before its completion of sale of the majority of its assets to Sony Corporation of America on 1 October 2008. Although it was established in 1987, the music c ...
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, Cductive and Listen.com (now Rhapsody) sold the music of independent labels and artists. The demand for
digital audio Digital audio is a representation of sound recorded in, or converted into, digital signal (signal processing), digital form. In digital audio, the sound wave of the audio signal is typically encoded as numerical sampling (signal processing), ...
downloading skyrocketed after the launch of Apple's iTunes Store (then called iTunes Music Store) in April 2003 and the creation of portable music and
digital audio player A portable media player (PMP) or digital audio player (DAP) is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. Normally they refer to small, battery-powered devices ...
s such as the
iPod The iPod is a series of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices that were designed and marketed by Apple Inc. from 2001 to 2022. The iPod Classic#1st generation, first version was released on November 10, 2001, about mon ...
. These players enabled music fans to carry their music with them, wherever they went.
Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...
launched its
Amazon MP3 Amazon Music (previously Amazon MP3) is a music streaming platform and digital music store operated by Amazon. As of January 2020, the service had 55 million subscribers. It was the first music store to sell music without digital rights manage ...
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 types of services usually use
e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) refers to commercial activities including the electronic buying or selling products and services which are conducted on online platforms or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile co ...
-enabled web widgets 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 Radiohead are an English rock band formed in Abingdon-on-Thames, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in 1985. The band members are Thom Yorke (vocals, guitar, piano, keyboards); brothers Jonny Greenwood (guitar, keyboards, other instruments) and Colin Gre ...
released the album '' In Rainbows'' 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, 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 in the United States and 23 other ...
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 Sound recording and reproduction, recorded music. Per the name, in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, record shops only sold gramophone records. But over the course of t ...
s selling CDs). In the early 2010s, online music stores—especially iTunes—experienced a marked increase in sales.
Consumer spending Consumer spending is the total money spent on final goods and services by individuals and households. There are two components of consumer spending: induced consumption (which is affected by the level of income) and autonomous consumption (which ...
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, 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 tracks 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 UK Charts Company Limited (formerly Music Industry Chart Services Limited), trading as the Official Charts Company (OCC) or the Official Charts (formerly the Chart Information Network), is a British inter-professional organisation ...
's singles. In 2013,
David Bowie David Robert Jones (8 January 194710 January 2016), known as David Bowie ( ), was an English singer, songwriter and actor. Regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Bowie was acclaimed by critics and musicians, pa ...
's " Where Are We Now?" was not allowed to chart because it was a pre-order for the album '' The Next Day'', 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 ...
, 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 legal 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, e ...
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 Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman, inventor, and investor best known for co-founding the technology company Apple Inc. Jobs was also the founder of NeXT and chairman and majority shareholder o ...
claimed in his introduction of the iTunes Store 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 FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software ...
or ALAC, but instead stick to WAV files in which no metadata can generally be embedded.
AIFF AIFF may refer to: * Audio Interchange File Format * All India Football Federation, the national governing body of Association football in India Film festivals * Addis International Film Festival, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia * Alexandria Internation ...
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 Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures, such as access control technologies, can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM ...
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 virus A computer virus is a type of malware that, when executed, replicates itself by modifying other computer programs and Code injection, inserting its own Computer language, code into those programs. If this replication succeeds, the affected areas ...
es)


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 In Greek mythology, Pandora was the first human woman created by Hephaestus on the instructions of Zeus. As Hesiod related it, each god cooperated by giving her unique gifts. Her other name—inscribed against her figure on a white-ground '' ky ...
, Last FM and recently
Spotify Spotify (; ) is a List of companies of Sweden, Swedish Music streaming service, audio streaming and media service provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. , it is one of the largest providers of music streaming services ...
, 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 *
Music industry The music industry are individuals and organizations that earn money by Songwriter, writing songs and musical compositions, creating and selling Sound recording and reproduction, recorded music and sheet music, presenting live music, concerts, ...
* Open Music Model * InMusic


References


External links


Off Book: The Evolution of Music Online
Documentary produced by Off Book (web series) {{Authority control