Online piracy has cut into national music sales by nearly a third since 1999, sending record and film revenues into a downward spiral, which hits everyone in the industry hard, from the record store clerks, songwriters, and technicians, to the artists themselves. Sometimes referred to as P2P, file sharing applications like the original Napster are a virtual treasure trove of music, movies, and software. If you use P2P software to download music, movies, or software, you may also be sharing those files to others.

Increasingly frustrated by the rise of illegal downloading, the music and film industries have been making examples of individual file-swappers. During the past year, the music and film industries have been bombarding colleges and universities with notices of illegal downloads of music and movie files by students. Recently, the music industry filed suit against four college students across the country, seeking billions of dollars in damages.

Despite all these lawsuits targeting campus pirates, more than half of all college students still download music and movies illegally, according to the University of Richmond’s Intellectual Property Institute. The music industry is fighting a losing battle to stop this downloading; they should realize that it is impossible to stop the downloading of music, it will only grow. Trying to stop it is a dead end street, it is much better to use the Internet.

Many musicians, artists, and software developers are changing the way they do business and are providing their works on the Internet for free. Maybe this is the way it should be. Musicians could make their money with performing, they could use the Internet to promote their music, and so they can charge more for their concerts. In the future they could even use the Internet to broadcast their live shows and in this way make more from a single concert. Then they still have a lot of other money making opportunities, for example commercials. A lot of musicians make a lot of money this way.

What ever the future brings, no one knows, but it is pretty sure that downloading of music for free from the Internet is here to stay, and the musician of today will be better of if they understand this and use it to their advantage.