Effects of Illegal Music Downloading on the Music Industry

Effects of Illegal Downloading on the Music Industry Illegal downloading is commonly known as piracy, it describe that the steeling music from artists, songwriters, musicians, record label employees and others whose hard work and great talent who make music possible. Nowadays, downloading music is available for everyone on internet. However, it is still illegal. Downloading music on internet is what most people are doing because they do not have to pay, and they can choose only the songs they want to have. Unlike CDs which we have the whole album which might contain the songs that we do not want to listen to, plus we have to pay for it. However, it is not always a good thing, it might be good for the people who download the music, but what about the music industry? Is it killing the industry, or does it have profits on it? This paper will discuss both pros and cons of piracy downloading on the Music Industry. One of the most important influences that internet piracy has had on the music industry is the sale of retail CDs. Until the past few years, CD sales were one of the key things that music industry insiders used in order to find out which musicians and albums were the most popular with the public. As the world’s technology has been growing, it made the digital music and internet piracy growing too, sales of retail CDs dropped amongst younger consumers to such an extent that the best selling CDs on the market began to bear very little resemblance to the music that was actually popular with the young listeners that form the backbone of the music industry. For example, Bob Dylan’s album Modern Times quickly became the number one best seller when it was released in 2006, despite the fact that none of his tracks were highly requested on mainstream radio programs or popular with younger listeners. The most well-known case that involves internet piracy and the music industry was when a group of major recording companies took peer-to-peer file