Introduction
Is music online free? Yes and no. Yes, some artists give away some of their music online free, but there are programs and other methods you can use to get music online free. No, some websites charge users per song or per album, or you have to sign up for a monthly plan to download songs, but it is for a price. Back in 1999 and 2000, a program called Napster changed the face of the music industry and record sales. Anyone with a stable Internet connection could download an unlimited amount of music online free. People would share their music with other people or someone working in the music industry would "leak" the music to Napster. Napster has since changed, and it did charge users with fees to download music. Another example is the now-defunct LimeWire program. Lime Wire had freeware where you can download music online free, but they had a subscription called "LimeWire Pro," where you would pay $9.99 a month for unlimited downloads. Many websites do have music online free, and some make you pay for music.
Online Retailers & Internet Radio Stations
Websites that sell music, such as Amazon MP3, iTunes, Rhapsody and other similar websites charge per song or allow you to buy an unlimited amount of songs per month on a monthly trial basis. Most of the songs on these websites allow you to buy individual songs and they are usually 99 cents and up. The largest sum of a song you can buy from one of the websites is around 3 dollars. There are Internet radio stations that have music online free. WinAMP is a media player that has a built-in Internet radio station called SHOUTcast and you can browse thousands of radio stations in different music genres. There are other Internet radio stations that you can get music online free. Other websites have monthly plans or other plans that allow you to download music, but you have to pay a fee.
Software Programs
There are other methods of getting music online free. Software programs like JDownloader allow you to copy a website link within the program and you can download the song on your PC. For example, Grooveshark is a popular online database for music online free, but you cannot download the music on the site. You must buy it. You can use JDownloader to copy a link to a song on that site and you can download it onto your computer. YouTube is another way to get music online free and many software developers allow you to take the music from YouTube and convert the YouTube video into an audio file, e.g. MP3 file. Website like FrostWire, Ares Destiny and Bearshare are called P2P programs. P2P programs allow you to download music online free and you can download music with these programs, but the illegality of this method has been questioned. You cannot share the music, but you can download it. Torrent sites are another way to get music online free. Many users upload entire albums and discographies of artists and you can download the entire music in just one file.
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