by Ben Deutsch

Created on: October 12, 2007

Well, maybe the answer should be "downloading music can be done in an ethical way". It can also be done in a greedy and selfish way, which shows no respect for the music or the musician.

There are many different places from which music can be downloaded. If you search the Internet, you will find a plethora of sites which have been set up for the specific purpose of allowing musicians to make their music available for free download to the public. The reason that musicians are happy to put their music on these sites is that they want the exposure. Maybe if someone hears half a dozen of your tracks and likes them, then at some later date they'll pay to come and see you play or to buy an album of your music. Maybe they'll just send you a flattering e-mail about how good your music is. Or they might be another musician looking for someone to gig with or to re-mix one of their tunes for them. It all helps to build an amateur musicians confidence.

The next type of download location are the digital music shops, where users pay to download either entire albums or individual tracks. These are probably even more controversial than free downloads. Many musicians love these sites, enabling them to sell music to people all over the world without having to be contracted to a company, or having all the hassle and expense of running their own label. Others are very resistant, particularly to those sites which sell tracks individually. They say that their albums were conceived to be listened to as a whole and that is how they should be distributed. Sometimes they feel that the packaging is also an integral part of the artistic statement they are trying to make with the album. There are also concerns about the sound quality of the files that are distributed through these sites. Many people avoid the best known online stores, which host millions of files, in favour of smaller independent sites, which host music by fewer artists, but which store the music as higher quality files. (Many people don't hear the difference between a high quality and a low quality MP3, but to a musician, who has spent hours, or even days, getting a piece of music to sound just right, they want it to be distributed with the best sound quality possible.)

In the long run, though, musicians will embrace these stores, as they combine the convenience of instant global distribution, with actually getting paid for all that hard work that went in to making the music in the first place. Of course, some people are

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