Music downloading

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Within the past 8 or 9 years or so there has been a huge revolution in the music industry. Orginally it was called Napster, but today there are several others such as I-tunes, Kazaa, and Aries. The entire idea behind these computer progams is that you can download music right from your computer without paying for the song or album that you download. Naturally almost everybody with a computer and an interest for music jumped on the band wagon and downloaded all of their favorite music, which then they can burn on blank cd's or their mp3 players.
The big problem with this was that certain musicans (metallica cough cough) said that people who downloaded music for free were comitting theft because they did not pay for the music. Also that it would ruin the music industry entirely because then the value of an actually album would drop and the would just set off a chain reaction. Therefore music downloading should be illegal. On the other side some people argued that music should be for everyone because it is an artform and art/stuff like that should be free.
This is a very interesting arguement on both sides. I personally used to download music without paying for it, but i never thought of it as a bad thing for 2 reasons. The first reason would be that downloading music never stopped me from buying cd's, even if i had the entire album already on my computer. Secondly downloading was a good way to preview a sond, and it lead to me buying certain albums that i may have never done without previewing the song through downloading.
So which side is right? Both sides have fair arguments, but i do think the happy medium for right now would be paying a certain few however much it is to download music. One shouldnt be able to get songs for free but i think that everyone should be able to get music.

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