Music Libraries

Abstract

Nowadays, there is a great increase in music distribution over the Internet. This phenomenon is common in many countries and therefore involves many issues such as: ways of distribution, music format, organizing music and copyright issues. The revolution in music prototypes (especially the MP3 music format) urged many people to turn to the Internet for free and easy-to-find music. Music files can be downloaded easily from the Internet anywhere in the world and be burned into a CD or DVD or transferred to a friend via usb-sticks. Music is also widely available as streams in Internet trough various services such as MySpace, YouTube and Spotify. Internet also is full of questions what is legal and what is not, because exchange of files is hard to supervise and the laws between countries also differ. All the legal services are constructed around a digital music library, containing millions of songs. Vast music libraries are easily accessed through Internet from users and serve as the ultimate way to find and listen to the music they desire. In this chapter, some representative popular music libraries are presented. Moreover, the interaction between the user and a music repository or a music store (a web site that sells music over the Internet) is another subject presented in this chapter. In section 1, terms and definitions related to digital music libraries are explained. Section 2 presents some popular music libraries, while section 3 presents some popular Internet music stores. Finally, a special version of a digital music library in streaming format (Internet Radio) is presented in section 4.