People still download music for free when they should be paying for their music. In “The Music Industry Extortion Scheme,” Reihan Salam writes about downloading music. Salam explains what’s happening with the music world and how music companies are trying to change it.
Apple is taking over. They charge 99 cents a song and dominate the music world. They took over the number one spot in music retaliating, beating Wal-Mart. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch condemned the idea of “music tax.” Even though his idea technically isn’t tax, he proposes we pay $5 a month or $60 a year. This gives us the opportunity to download as much music as we want and insures we cannot be sued. Ninety percent of record companies agree with him. They are sick of losing money from downloaded music. Over the last decade, The Big Music Company (Warner Music Group) shrunk from $15 billion to $10 billion.
Salam states he uses eMusic. eMusic offers both DRM, which are transfers and restrictions of free music, and free MP3 downloads. Salam calls people cheapskates that download free music; he’s against downloading free music.

Salam helps one understand why the music companies become angry over illegally downloading music. Arrington’s idea of proposing “music tax” is superb. Five dollars a month to download an unlimited amount of songs is cost efficient. Apple charges too much for songs. Ninety-nine cents a song is a rip off, when you can get 100 songs for free with downloading providers.
Salam writes, “This has not strengthened the record companies’ position -- at this point, they’re losing money and everybody hates them.” There are over 9,000 songs on my computer and I only bought 50 of them from Apple. If I bought everyone of my songs, nine thousand dollars would be gone; I could have bought a car, paid for a semester of college, etc. I am going to still download music. The music companies make enough money, and even if they dropped $5 billion they still have another $10 billion to work with.
An average person has 800 songs that are illegally on each person MP3, IPod, computer, etc. If every person paid for each of their songs it would be an outrage. It is too much to pay for each song you want, especially when some people have an outrageous number. That is why people still download music; they have a large number of songs and they don’t want to pay for each one. In their eyes they see it as a waste of money when they know they can get it for free. For other people that pay for music they probably don’t have a large number of songs because paying for each song adds up and can be expensive.