Music on the Internet Essay by capital writers

This paper examines how for the last several years, the recording industry has been battling to stop on-line music-swapping. It looks at how the battle began over Napster and has expanded to take on Napster's descendants. It evaluates how despite the abundance of evidence suggesting that on-line music-swapping actually boosts record sales, the recording industry feels that this practice robs them of potential profits. It looks at how client-to-client file-swapping software already exists and how in many cases it is open source. It shows that shutting down individual sites is only a temporary set-back to the overall music-swapping community, which can quickly move on to another site with the same basic code. It discusses how the battle for control continues because the recording industry continues to attempt to control what it sees as its rightful domain (recorded music) without realizing that it is mistakenly battling for control of the uncontrollable (the advance of technology in general and the internet in specific).