Does anyone actually buy music these days? Really, it seems like the days of going to the music store, looking for your favourite artists, seeing if they released anything new and carrying CDs home are gone...taken over by iTunes and illegal downloads. In the past few years, since the release of the iPod and rise of the MP3, the distribution of music has gone (almost entirely) digital, with CDs only purchased by die-hard fans, Zune-haters, and people who happen to walk by a music store. However, don't be so gullible as to think that all of those downloaders are doing so legally, with the rise of digital purchases comes also digital theft.

Napster, Limewire, Ares, and bitTorrent, to name a few, are all applications designed to deliver to the user programs through what's known as file-sharing. With file-sharing, you can download twenty David Bowie songs without him ever seeing a cent and without a single financial transaction, essentially cutting out the middle-man between you and the music. Despite what I describe, though, the programs listed above are, by nature, completely legal in and of themselves but the actual act of downloading the files is illegal. This serves as a intricate and brilliant loophole for those who choose to jack their tunes.

And, of course, the majority of bands and musicians are completely outraged at the theft of their work (as right they should be) by means of digital hijacking, as both they and their record companies suffer for it. On an interesting note, it is a well-known point that most artists collect their main revenue from concerts and merchandise rather than the selling of albums, which mainly serve as publicity and label pay, bringing rise to questions of why the artists should be so outraged if they still receive the former from illegal downloading. On the other hand, however, there are a select few musicians who are willing to, not only cope with the digital distribution phenomena but welcome and embrace it.

Radiohead, for example, served as the forerunner and herald of their kind when they allowed their fans to choose what price their newest album, In Rainbows, should be. It was available online and was downloaded by thousands of internet-users for free. Similarly, frontman of Nine Inch Nails Trent Reznor stated, after seeing the price of his album Year Zero marked far above what he deemed appropriated, that the fans should go out and download, rip, and distribute the album without charge. Later on in their career, Reznor released NIN's Ghosts and The Slip via online, once again, without charge.

So without a doubt, the music industry has been changed forever by the rise of digital distribution, both in its sales and its relationship with its artists. In the coming years, it should be interesting to see how the direct artist-audience relationship affects the industry further.