Getting music online has become an everyday fact of life. We have moved on from the days of buying CDs at the local store and ripping the files to our computers. Almost all sales of music is now digital, and the marketplace has moved from the record store to the Apple Store. We live in a world where cassette players are as antiqued in the eyes of many users as record players or juke boxes. While the digital era of music has only been around for roughly a decade, there has already been a number of different periods that have defined it.
When music was first becoming digital in the early 2000s, it flowed freely online on file sharing programs such as Napster and Kazaa. These sites allowed users to swap files that they had ripped off their CDs. As the file sharing program’s notoriety grew, so did the scrutiny. The state governments of many influential countries worked with record labels to shut down these programs and make sure that it was difficult to obtain free music online. But even though the record companies won the battle, the music marketplace was forever changed. Users now preferred to get their music online, and CD sales plummeted over the decade.
The Apple Store, offering cheap singles for download from its store, flourished. Video services such as YouTube began to cater more and more to music consumers. Even with these things in place, people could still find ways to get free music online. And one of the most creative ways has been to rip audio from YouTube videos using a popular website service.
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Lawsuit to Stop YouTube Videos From Being Converted To MP3s
YouTube recently sent a cease and desist letter to YouTube-Mp3-.org, a company that specializes in converting user copied YouTube URLs into downloadable MP3s. The site’s service was used by over ten million users to download music to their computers. But is this really the end of downloading free music?
Pundits argue that coders will simply find a more ingenious way to rip music from the video site, and that other programs can already do an even better job, at a premium. YouTube is fighting what still amounts to a losing battle. In the digital age, users are still going to find ways to download music for free, even if the easiest avenues are shut down. The question is not if all music will have to be paid for, but who will start the next YouTube-Mp3 site.
What do you think readers? Will Google’s lawsuit to stop YouTube videos from being converted to MP3s signal the end of free music downloads? Share your thoughts in the comments section.
Author Bio
This post is written by Donald, he works at myoutdesk. You can hire efficient virtual assistants at Myoutdesk.com.
It will be very interesting to see what happens. But I recently read somewhere that Google is going after these smaller websites because it’s low hanging fruit compared to going after RealPlayer, which facilitates downloads from Youtube. But what that commenter fails to understand is that RealPlayer’s software doesn’t bypass the Content ID system which is mean to protect copyrights. The RealPlayer download feature only works with videos that aren’t tagged with an ID.
I think also that Google is getting pressure from entertainment moguls to actually do something about blatant copyright violations since they are selling music & movies now. If they get to profit by selling content, they should do more to protect the content is the line of reasoning. Google’s in a tough spot because they want to give the world the appearance that they are for a free and open internet, but they also want to add this new revenue stream into the mix.