Abstract
The music industry will face great challenges for the next few years. Due to new technologies and especially the Internet, the industry has to find new ways to "sell music" and to make the customers interested in their product. The main issue in the music industry is the development of the digital music or the MP3. Now it is common to download music from the Internet even if it is illegal. We can find peer-to-peer file sharing websites and download thousands of preferred music files. This phenomenon began 10 years ago with the Napster website. This website has been the first to allow Internet users to share music on Internet. Now this first version of the website is closed; however Napster has adapted the website framework to the law.
As mentioned earlier, the phenomenon began 10 years. At this time, the music industry and especially the major music companies were prosperous and enjoyed high sales of CDs and other formats (physical). Customers had few choices but they were satisfied by the CD format. Now we can say that it is the customer who controls the market and not the music industry and the major music companies. Peer-to peer file sharing websites, I mean those which are not legal but highly used, are controlled by amateurs and not professionals. Internet is such a big domain that it is virtually impossible to keep a check on people.
