Paid download

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Paid download (also known as a digital download or a digital single) is an official and legal music single available for purchase through an online store. Popular examples of online music stores that sell digital singles and albums include the iTunes Store and Napster. Not only is digital downloading for music there are also audio books and travel guides which can be found at sight such as Lodingo and Audible. Downloads are often encoded with Digital Rights Management that restricts making extra copies of the music or play purchased songs on certain digital audio players.

Paid digital download may face competition from the development of techniques enabling the digital extraction of songs played on the radio which, although offering lower quality sound, is also legal.

1 Current status
2 See also
3 References

[edit] Current status

[edit] United States

Legal music downloads were first compiled by Billboard in 2003, but they didn't gain mainstream acceptance in the United States until around February 2005, when digital sales for singles started to be included in the Billboard Hot 100 and other Billboard charts. In the year before, the Hot 100 chart was similar to the Hot 100 Airplay chart, because only minor CD-single sales affected the chart. The inclusion of digital singles has immensely helped many songs chart and peak higher, including Jessica Simpson's cover of "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" which became her second-highest peaking Hot 100 single thanks to digital sales. Another example is Britney Spears' "Do Somethin'" which wasn't released as a radio single, but charted in 2005 due to top-fifty (number forty-nine) digital sales.

[edit] RIAA certification and American records

Single certifications were introduced in February 2005. Songs that sell a certain number of copies are often certified by the RIAA with the permission of the artist and the record company.

In November 2005, the record for the bestselling digital single in the United States was held by Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl", which has sold over one million downloads, making it the first song to achieve diamond download status. Since then, "Bad Day" by Daniel Powter has overcome it in terms of sales to become the bestselling digital single. The highest week sales was held by "Gold Digger" by Kanye West. It is now held by "Low" by rapper Flo-Rida when the single sold 470,000 downloads one week in January 2008, certifing the single double platinum in just one week. The single beat the previous record holder, Fergie's 2006 single "Fergalicious". The underground dance music scene has not been left out either with the digital download network Beatport.com hitting its one million download mark in 2005. In addition aritsts like Carrie Underwood and Kelly Clarkson have singles selling over 2 million downloads with "Before He Cheats" with 2,438,897 downloads and "Breakaway" with 2,098,056.

[edit] United Kingdom

The UK Official Download Chart was launched on 1 September 2004, and included any Permanent Digital Download track, under 10 minutes long, being sold for a minimum price of 40p (0.4 GBP). In January 2005, downloaded tracks outsold physical singles for the first time in UK music history, prompting The Official UK Charts Company to begin to incorporate downloads for the first time into the UK Singles Chart on 17 April 2005, at which time the separate download chart was discontinued. Initially this was on condition that the song must have a physical media release at the same time; this rule was fully lifted on 1 January 2007 meaning all download sales are now eligible in the chart.

On 16 December 2006, the winner of The X Factor, Leona Lewis had her single "A Moment Like This" released for download. 50,000 tracks were downloaded in under 30 minutes, believed to be a record.^[1] In October 2007, digital downloads in the UK reached an all-time high of 1.7 million downloads in a week.^[2]

[edit] Japan

Japan has the highest amount of digital downloads sold in the world. The highest selling digital single in Japan, and the world, is "Flavor Of Life" by Utada Hikaru with 7.7 million legal downloads ^[3]. The runner-up is "Keep Tryin'" also by Utada Hikaru with 2.5 million paid downloads. The third is "Koi no Tsubomi" by Kumi Koda with 2.3 million paid downloads.