Online music stores

An online music store is an online business which sells audio files over the Internet, usually sound recordings of music songs or classical pieces, in which the user pays on a per-song or subscription basis. It may be differentiated from music streaming services in that the online music store sells the purchaser the actual digital music file, while streaming services offer the patron partial or full listening without the actually owning the source file. However, online music stores generally offer partial streaming previews of songs, with some songs even available for full length listening. Online music stores typically show a picture of the album art or of the performer or band for each song. Some online music stores also sell recorded speech files, such as podcasts and video files of movies.

The first free, high fidelity online music archive of downloadable songs on the Internet was the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) in 1993. IUMA was started by Rob Lord, Jeff Patterson and Jon Luini from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In 1998, Miami entrepreneur Ivan J. Parron founded and launched Ritmoteca.com as one of the early online music store business models. It allowed visitors to visually search through a jukebox-style catalog of over 300,000 songs organized by albums, listen to a 30-second music clips (previews) or music video and purchase the MP3 format via downloading. It sold single songs for $0.99 and entire album downloads for $9.99. The company's graphical user interface was attractive enough to garner distribution deals with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Bertelsmann Music Group and Warner Music Group. These agreements gave the company online digital distribution rights for artists such as U2, Madonna, Britney Spears, Enrique Iglesias and Jay-Z. The company concept had originally been for the consumer to download an MP3 file and "burn" it onto a CD, so that the CD could be listened to on a CD player. However, early MP3 players from companies like Creative Labs began to be available on the market, which meant that users could listen to MP3 files directly.

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