How has the music industry dealt with Internet music sharing software and file formats?

How has the music industry dealt with Internet music sharing software and file formats?

Ethan Feerst and Dylan Stewart (Technology Therapist, Mac Guru) gives expert video advice on: Is it legal to download copyrighted media via the Internet?; How does file sharing work?; Can I watch my favorite TV shows over the Internet? and more...

The music industry has dealt with Internet music sharing softwar and file formats badly! Take the early days of Napster. Had the music industry been one of the earlier adopters of that kind of technology, the technology that allowed you to share songs with other people through the internet, they could have saved their industry. Because they fought it as long as they did, file sharing and stealing music became common practice. As an end result, when the I-tunes store finally opened up, and finally gave people a lagitamate legal way to down load music for their digital players to their computers, the music industry saw the first boom they had financially ever since computers and music got mentioned together. Now at this point this is all starting to change, the music industry protects their tracts with what is called DRM technology. Which stands for digital rights management. This allows you to download a track, but you can only play it on certain computers a minimal amount of times. You can put it on a minimul amount of digital players like i-pods, and that's the way they keep piracy at bay. What's starting to happen at the moment is the question of DRM's neccessity, would the music industry fair better and make more money if music was free on the internet as well? Some services like EMI and Universal are begining to offer their music tracks online without this digital rights management. What happens after that remains to be seen, but the common consensus is that if the music industry continue to support technology they will see that the income that they've lost based on file sharing can be regained through the internet and online services.