What is a Legal Music Download and what's not? Legal FAQ

Beware of music download web sites that make claims of being legal. You may find wording like this: "People are not getting sued for using our software". That is in fact is true. Use of the file sharing software is not illegal, nor is the program itself... but sharing mp3 music (the act of downloading mp3 music from other user without paying royalty fees to the artist) is NOT legal. The act of downloading music without paying for it is what people in the US are being sued over. Even if you paid to be part of the file sharing program, none of that money goes to the artist.

Because so many file sharing programs claim to be legal, they are in fact deceiving the public by making it sound like the act of downloading mp3 music from their site is in fact legal. For this very reason, we do not try to over use the word legal. We prefer to use the word "legitimate" because it's a word that has not been overused. Legitimate means that every site featured in our review has agreements in place to pay royalties to artists and record companies. The down side to this is that most of these sites are only available to residents of the United States. Some sites offer music downloads to multiple countries and we've tried to point that out where we can.

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