Concept
A digital music store is a business that sells of music recordings over the Internet. Customers gain ownership of a license to use the files, in contrast to a music streaming service, where they listen to recordings without gaining ownership. Customers pay either for each recording or on a subscription basis. Online music stores generally also offer partial streaming previews of songs, with some songs even available for full length listening. They typically show a picture of the album art or of the performer or band for each song. Some online music stores also sell recorded speech files, such as podcasts, and video files of movies. The first free, high-fidelity online music archive of downloadable songs on the Internet was the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA), which was started by Rob Lord, Jeff Patterson and Jon Luini from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993. Sony Music Entertainment Japan launched the first digital music store in Japan on 20 December 1999, entitled Bitmusic, which initially focused on A-sides of singles released by Japanese domestic musicians. The realization of the market for downloadable music grew widespread with the development of Napster, a music and service created by Shawn Fanning that made a major impact on the Internet scene in 2000. Some services have tethered downloads, meaning that playing songs requires an active membership. Napster was founded as a pioneering Internet service that emphasized sharing audio files, typically music, encoded in MP3 format. The original company ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringement, ceased operations and was eventually acquired by Roxio. In its second incarnation Napster became an online music store until Rhapsody acquired it from Best Buy on 1 December 2011. Later companies and projects successfully followed its P2P file sharing example such as Gnutella, Freenet, Kazaa, Bearshare, and many others. Some services, like LimeWire, Scour, Grokster, Madster, and eDonkey2000, were brought down or changed due to similar circumstances.
