The Music Instrument Store

Stagg Standard Folding Music Stand with Free Carrying Bag

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Retail Price: $39.95

Amazon Price: $17.95

by Susan Reynolds

Information technology has brought many advantages to the life of a common man. In many situations this is a win-win game for the both service provider as well as service user. In some situations it is easy to identify its win-lose (or lose-win depending on where you stand!) situation but some situations are complex to determine who is winning and who is losing. Online music downloads is one of those curious case.

This was until the digital revolution in music industry. It all started when the digital encryption of music was invented and hence realized that the music encoded in this format is retrieved as close to original. The cited reason for this was that there is no physical contact between the head and the storage media hence the clarity. So much for the technology but lo and behold! The physical storage media was no longer required and it was possible to store music in a format that it could be stored in servers and possibility of downloading and playing it from anywhere in the world! The concept of digitizing music and storing it online with a freedom to visitors to download/play at will has been exploited to hilt resulting in an ever continuing debate on the ethical aspects of it. As with any other quality debate this also has arguments in its favor and against. People in favor of free world say that Music is an art and no-one can really own true art. Another argument in the favor of free download is that it provides a platform to the upcoming musicians for showcasing their talents to the world, virtually. This acts as a dipstick to their performance as well as greenhorn musicians can identify from the feedback if he/she should seriously pursue the career in music.

There are quite a few arguments against the free download of music which have been validated by various Governments as well. For instance, it is illegal to download music in various countries and the offence attracts the monetary to few months? confinement in jail. The repeat identified offence can land the user in jail for longer periods. The reason why there are not many people booked by law, even though free music download is quite rampant, could be the complexity in providing evidence against the offender. Nevertheless, the day is not too far when there will be restrictive software which would be able to prevent any kind of illegal downloads.

The technical aspects of managing your downloaded music are interesting as well. If you do not remember where you stored the last downloaded number, it is very much possible that you may have lost it forever. Hence it is advised to keep the downloaded music in the default ?My Music? folder provided by MS-Windows. Another issue with storing downloaded music in your computer?s hard disk is the risk of duplication. You might end up with storing the same music file into various folders by artist, movie, genre or ratings. This eats away the disk space as, usually a five minutes song file occupies a space of 5-7 Mega Bytes. This problem can be easily taken care if you have a good music player which classifies the same song into the categories you want as well as the feature of sorting the songs on the various categories you choose.

One more aspect which needs to be highlighted is the legal factor in the Free Music downloads. As most of the free music sites are located in the countries where free music downloads are not illegal, people from those countries could be downloading the music where this is illegal. There is no effective mechanism so far to restrict such sites on a national level hence the onus lies on the poor user who may not be aware that he might be inviting litigation related to copyrights infringement by innocently downloading the free content.

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