Advantages and Disadvantages of Downloading Music Online

We can all agree that downloading music is much better than going out there and buying CD or waiting for it to come out while you are listening to singles playing on radio. However there is disadvantages that goes with downloading music like getting file that has virus that might crash your computer/laptop which you’ll have to spend money on it to be fix. Here are Advantages and Disadvantages of Downloading Music Online.

Advantages                  

• More and more recording companies or artists themselves decide to make money by selling their singles online, as we know iTunes has proven to be the right way to go when selling more single or albums for artists digitally.
• The best thing that ever happened to musicians is the World Wide Web as they can now reach more audience in the world. Musicians can now make music accessible to anyone anywhere in the world and make money in the process. That’s how today their singles are top the charts in different countries.
• Back in the days people used to fall in love with a song they heard on radio and all they had to do was buy the whole entire album to listen to that one track again and some might not even like the album. Today you can download that one song you love the minute you’re hearing it, digital downloads make it easy for you to access music at the tip of a click.
• More consistent and higher quality meta-data, because the entering of the meta-data is more centralized and done by groups with financial interests.
• Music download companies are more accountable to users than creators of file-sharing programs
• Centralized repository of music makes it easier to find the songs you want.
  

Disadvantages

• 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.
• Let’s face it, no one has ever received a virus from a CD. One serious disadvantage of the ever so popular digital downloading is that you can never really guarantee that you’re getting exactly what you wanted.
• Few, if any, online music stores offer music in lossless, metadata-enabled formats such as FLAC, but instead stick to WAVE or AIFF files in which no metadata can generally be embedded. In contrast, lossless rips of CDs in FLAC format are widely available on the web for illegal downloading.
• While it’s a wonderful thing to allow your fans access to your downloads online, the biggest disadvantage has been illegal downloads. Technology makes it simple to replicate and share Internet files, often depreciating the value of your music. While you are using the web to analyze your fan base and gain revenue, some have made it that much more difficult for you to do so because they are leaking your music free of charge to the public.
• Other disadvantage is that some website want you to subscribe or register before you can download music, and it’s a bit tricky because you don’t know if you supposed to pay or not so make sure you understand the terms and conditions of the website you’re using.
• Some stores use Digital Rights Management 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.