The Music Industry's Influence on P2P File Sharing

Shoes are a basic item most people in the modern world choose to own. If you want to keep your feet dry, comfortable, and free of blisters then you need to obtain a pair of shoes. Before the Internet was invented, music was similar to shoes. When you wanted to listen to music you went to the store and bought the record. Music was a material item only available in a physical form—records, tapes and CDs. Therefore, music had a limited supply which correlated with the demand for the records. Furthermore, the music industry decided which artists they would sign to a label and what music was available to the public in stores. In order for an artist to generate demand for their music they first had to land a record contract with the music industry because the music industry controlled the di

In 1997, a developer at Advanced Multimedia Products named Tomislav Uzelac created the AMP MP3 Playback Engine, which is considered the first prime-time MP3 player (Jones 1). Shortly after the AMP software was available on the Internet, two university students, Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev, transformed the Amp engine into a Windows software program. They called their creation "Winamp." In 1998 Winamp was offered on the Internet as a free music player (Kwansei 1). Music lovers all over the world started trading MP3 files. By doing this, music fans were offering both non-copyrighted and copyrighted music free of charge. At this point the popularity of MP3s—and the legal problems associated with trading copyrighted material—skyrocketed.

Soon after the release of Winamp, other computer programmers jumped in to the scene creating hundreds of programs relating to the MP3 file format. Every week, new software was released to meet the demands of MP3 lovers across the world (Jones 1). Ripping and encoding programs extracted music tracks off of CDs and encoded the songs into the MP3 file format. With this software, anyone with a music CD and computer could produce a MP3 file. Search engines made it even easier to find the exact song a person wanted. Small, convenient portable MP3 players allowed people to take digital music with them, wherever they went.

Unfortunately, music fans can never really escape the corporate grasp of the commercial music industry. Even when fans are exercising their right to musical freedom by downloading off of P2P networks, they are within reach of the commercial music industry. The recent lawsuit that shut down the file sharing service Napster was a personal blow to the 25 million music fans that enjoyed using the service (Negativland 19). The industry has also been known to hire “copyright watchdog” companies to formally file complaints against college students who download music (Black 1).

stribution of all music available to the public. Musical artists now have an alternative way to expose themselves.

Some topics in this essay:
, Trade Commission, Napster Roy, Internet Negativland, American Unfortunately, CDs Sony, P2P Software, Dmitry Boldyrev, KaZaA Morpheus, Internet MP3s, music industry, commercial music, commercial music industry, file sharing, p2p file, p2p file sharing, musical artists, mp3 files, p2p software, jones 1, web pages, software companies, p2p software companies, file sharing programs, mp3 file format,