1. Pay for use The major issue facing
recording industry is how to get paid for all music that is being downloaded, swapped and sold online. If you are using a legal music download service, there should be a fee per song, per month or per year to have continued access to service.In keeping with spirit of internet, most of major legal music sites are offering free mp3 files just for signing up, for keeping your subscription current and in general obeying rules of site.
Note: Usually, there is an extensive trial period. If you really want free music, you can sign up for multiple sites and get access to hundreds of free mp3 downloads for little or no money up front.
2. Size Limits The legal music download sites mostly distribute music from reputable labels and artists. This means, that you won’t find extensive mixes, and custom files that will slow down your connection and take forever to download. Also, relatively small files gives some assurance to music retail industry that a site is actually selling music files and not illegal video games or movies which can be hundreds of times larger.
3. Volume limits Legal music download sites usually distribute their material on a per song basis. One of major advantages of buying your music online is that you don’t have to spend $17 for an entire album if you only want 3 or 4 songs. The legal sites will set up song volume limits as well as file transfer limits. This prevents unscrupulous customers from setting up their computers to copy hundreds of files in a few hours.
Note: even if you are music fan – Really, why would you need 300 songs at once?
4. Larger databases, Larger costs One peculiarity of legal music download stores and file sharing services is that variety comes with a price. The larger, more established services will give you access to hundreds of thousands of song, but it will cost you. Expect to pay an average of $1-$3 per song. If you work it out, average album will probably cost a little bit more than a CD from Wal-Mart or Target.
Keep in mind, that legal music download sites must give a portion of their fees back to recording industry. Also, songs are not disposable since sound quality probably won’t degrade over time. Even CDs can get scratched and lose their quality after a while.
5. Limited Choice Most of legal music download sites don’t have capacity or copyright authority to distribute hundreds of millions of songs. The songs are stored on servers with a finite amount of space unlike tangled web of computer to computer file transfers from illegal sites.
