Music downloading is the transferring of music from a website to your computer and encompasses both illegal and legal downloads. Illegal downloads are copyright material downloaded without payment or permission. There are thousands of online music stores which sell albums and digital singles such as iTunes, Napster, Amazon MP3, eMusic, Nokia Music Store and hundreds more.

Digital Rights Management are sometimes encoded to paid downloads and that place restrictions on the make of extra copies or to play a purchased song on certain audio players. Usually they are compressed with the use of a lossy codec, reducing the file size and thus bandwidth requirements. This can cause a loss in the quality to listeners when it is compared to CDs as well as cause compatibility issues when using certain devices and software.

Some sites do have losslessly compressed files and uncompressed files. There are artists that allow all, some or specific song downloading from their websites and often low-quality sampling or short previews of songs are available at online music stores. Legal downloads of music faced challenges from many artists, Recording Industry Association of America and record labels and the Universal Music Group decided in July 2007 not to renew iTunes’s contracts. The reason was for the pricing of songs and the Universal Music Group wanted to charge downloads depending on Artists and it may be more or less.

The Song “Apologize” by the original artist OneRepublic and remix of the song by Timbaland with over ten million downloads from the original and remix both, are the most downloaded song in History to date. However, Michael Jackson’s songs soon after his death is the first artist’s to be selling more than one million songs, downloaded in only a week.