Music Online

An online music store is an online business that sells audio files, usually music, on a per-song and/or subscription basis. It may be differentiated from some online music databases that offer music streaming in that music stores offer the actual music file, while streaming services offer partial or full listening without actually providing a file for downloading.

However, music stores generally offer partial streaming previews, some even with full-length playback. Music streaming services offer listening without the listener actually owning the source file. Music streaming is limited to devices connected to the Internet, but is, on the other hand, cheaper than buying a music file, mostly even free of charge.


The Internet's first free high fidelity online music archive of downloadable songs was the Internet Underground Music Archive. IUMA was started by Rob Lord, Jeff Patterson and Jon Luini from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993. The realization of the market for these services grew widespread around the time of Napster, a music and file sharing service created by Shawn Fanning that made a major impact on the Internet scene during the year 2000. Some services have tethered downloads, meaning that playing songs requires an active membership.


In 2000 Sony became the second company to make music from one of the major labels available for sale on the internet, with 'The Store'. However, it was not the first online music sharing company, because the first one was shut down in a lawsuit under the DMCA.

The big record companies were apprehensive to license their catalogs to outside companies and refused the late 90's requests of MP3.com, Cductive and eMusic to sell digital song downloads. They eventually decided to start their own services, which they could control directly.