Sunday, August 9, 2009

Legal Music Downloads Will Cost You Money

By John Roberts

Legal music downloads are only legal if you pay for them. Obviously, there are still peer-to-peer sites out there that you can get free music from and it is always tempting to use those instead of paying for your music library. After all, there are so many people out there in cyberspace, how could anyone possibly be worried about one lonely person is doing?

Since the music industry is losing million of dollars through piracy and that they have successfully won several battles, they are taking notice of who is doing what out there in cyber space. They have the money and the time to go after the worst offenders. Several counts of piracy may not seem like a big deal but when you consider that every original download is one count and every upload is one count of piracy, the numbers can start to skyrocket.

Depending on how much music you have pirated, you can end up owing the record companies thousand of dollars. Some people have even racked up over a million dollars in fines and copyright fees. Most of the people that are caught not using legal music downloads are college students or average citizens. The record companies will often settle out of court and have only made examples of a select few.

However, the average person cannot afford several thousands of dollars in fines so it is best to pay the money upfront and save you the headache in the future. Since many of the legal music downloading sites have taken care of the DRM restrictions, once you pay for a song you can do what you will with it. You can share the song, put it on your digital music player or copy to your own CD mix.

Most people only want a track or two off of an album, so you are looking at cost of $0. 99 to $1. 29 per track. This is not a moral decision. By paying for your music upfront you could be saving yourself a lot of money.

They have a legal foothold to sue those that do have legal music downloads. According to the piracy laws, when people used to record music onto a cassette from the radio, they had a right to sue. They just did not have a way to track the people that were doing it and the music industry just had to accept the loss.

It the best course of action is to pay your money upfront and happily trot off with your music to do what you will with it. When faced with alternative, is there a better solution?

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