A music download refers to the transferring of a music file from an Internet-facing computer or website to a user's local computer. This term encompasses both legal downloads and downloads of copyright material without permission or payment if required.

Popular examples of online music stores that sell digital singles and albums include the iTunes Store, Napster, and nimbit. Paid downloads are sometimes encoded with Digital Rights Management that restricts making extra copies of the music or play purchased songs on certain digital audio players.

Digital music sales now generate around $2 billion in revenue, with tracks available through 500 online services located in 40 countries, representing around 10 percent of the total global music market. Around the world in 2006, an estimated five billion songs, equating to 38,000 years in music were swapped on peer-to-peer websites, while 509 million were purchased online.

Music downloads offered by artists

Some artists allow their songs to be downloaded from their websites, often as a short preview or a low quality sampling. Others have embedded services in their sites that allow purchases of their singles or albums, as demonstrated by Metallica's official website.

The band Bomb The Music Industry!, known for their DIY punk ethic, released all five of their albums as free downloads on their website.

Solo artist Tom Fox has racked up over one million mp3 downloads since deciding to give away his music on the internet.

Other music artists, most notably Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor, have offered their music to listeners for free, sometimes in defiance of their record labels. In 2005, Nine Inch Nails released the full-length album With Teeth on their MySpace page prior to its official in-store release date. More recently, the band leaked various tracks off their album Year Zero by hiding USB flash drives in concert venues. In past years, acts such as these have been commonplace from artists who seek to get their music out to a wider market, usually by tapping the power of the Internet.

In addition to this and to music stores, peer-to-peer downloading programs or websites such as LimeWire, Kazaa, BearShare, MP3-Xtreme and many others are very popular. Additionally, Torrent file sharing is another common method of peer-to-peer transfers. There is much controversy relating to file sharing due to copyright restrictions that apply to recorded media.

Challenges to legal music downloads

Even legal music downloads have faced a number of challenges from artists, record labels and the Recording Industry Association of America. In July 2007, the Universal Music Group decided not to renew their long term contracts with iTunes. This legal challenge was primarily based upon the issue of pricing of songs, as Universal wanted to be able to charge more or less depending on the artist, a shift away from iTunes' standard 99 cents per song pricing. Many industry leaders feel that this is only the first of many show-downs between Apple Inc. and the various record labels.