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What is "Online Music"? Well, in truth,
"Online Music" (or OM)could mean any of a lot of things.
It could be taken as meaning music broadcast via the internet, on
one of the thousands of internet "radio stations". It
could also be interpreted as buying or selling music through e-commerce
sites such as Amazon or AudioStreet. Some people might tell you
that OM is all about the Musicians and Bands using the internet
to publicise themselves, making OM all about advertising and reaching
out to fans.
In truth, OM is a litlle of all of the above. But what it usually
means, is the technologies behind distributing/playing music via
the internet.
The technologies are the varying type of sound file format and
the different ways of playing them. They also include the means
in which people obtain the files.
Examples of the file types used are: MP3, Real
Audio and WMA. These three are the most popular file types used
for distributing music over the Internet.
MP3 (a.k.a mpeg audio version 3) is by far the most popular and
common music file type on the Internet. Made famous in recent history
by the "Napster Debate" on the legality of MP3's. MP3
was one of the first of the file types to be practical to distribute
online. It compresses the sound file to around about a tenth of
the size you would have if you just copied a song exactly from the
original. This results in a slight drop in sound quality, but it
is practically unnoticable to anyone but a trained sound engineer.
MP3 is not favoured by the music industry, because it is easy to
pirate songs from almost any source into MP3.
Real Audio is different to MP3, in that it is a "Streaming
Audio" file type. It (for the most part) cannot be directly
downloaded and stored onto your computer. Because of this, Real
Audio is preferred by the music industry over MP3. The sound quality
of Real Audio depends on the speed of your internet connection:
the better the speed, the better the quality. Real Audio is nowhere
near as popular as MP3 due to the inability to store it for listening
at anytime.
WMA (Windows Media Audio) is Microsoft's answer to the MP3 boom.
WMA songs are slightly smaller than MP3, with slightly better sound
quality. They can also be copyrighted to protect from pirating.
This makes WMA a favourite with the music industry, as they can
use it to release promotional material by an artist, with out fear
of it being unlawfully copied. At least, they could for a couple
of days after the WMA technology was released to the public. Within
three days of the release, the security encryption was broken and
so-called "decoders" for WMA started to appear. Despite
this, it is still used a lot by record companies. WMA can also be
used to restrict how long a listener can keep the sound file: "licenses"
can be coded into the file so the listener must re-register that
they have this file every month or so. A future version of WMA will
also allow the file to delete itself after a set period.
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