What is a music tube?

The history of tube sites started with Google’s famous service YouTube which became a synonym from streaming movies on the internet. The expression tube is referred from the original YouTube and now used for any kind of website offering streaming online media to the public.

A music tube is defined as a website featuring music videos as well as audio streams only. There is a varity of websites offering this kind of service, their goal is bringing together musicians, producers as well as consumers. Especially for newcomers in the music industry, these kind of sites offer a huge chance to show their art to a broad public without having to sign a contract with a recored label or invest in producing CDs or DVDs. Many famous artists started their career on one of these tube websites, offering their songs freely in order to find fans and followers to support them.

Unfortunately, there are also music tubes who display content without a proper license to do so and the record industry is doing it’s best to take legal steps against these types of websites. While some artists agree with getting their songs published freely or to some extend freely, websites stealing content are harming artists, companies and consumers, since the losses due to free distribution have to be calculated into the price for legal CDs, DVDs and MP3 downloads.

By paying for streaming or downlodable music as well as buying CDs or DVDs you support the artists and enable them to continue to do what they can do best: Making your day a little brighter by entertaining you with their art.

How to find legal music download sites

While professionals can easily spot if a website offering music downloads is legal, it’s sometimes hard for consumer to separate shady offers from trustworthy websites. First of all, websites offering songs and albums for free, especially popular new releases, are always illegal and distribute copyrighted material without consent of the copyright owners.
You best choice is to go for the big and reputable websites, like the famous Apple iTunes store or the Amazon MP3 store. They are offering almost every kind of music you can think of, offer secure payment and you have the guarantee to buy original songs.

If buying from unknown sources, you should pay attention to the following

• Graphics on the website, especially covers should not look like scanned and covers should not show foreign language if the US version of single or album is advertised and the artist isn’t foreign.

• Words like rip or ripped should alert you, as well as extremely low prices that are a fraction of what other chops charge.

• All reputable shops have their own credit card merchant accounts, don’t buy when a shop only accepts unusual payment methods like Western Union money transfer or foreign online payment processors. Palpal is fine as long as the shop offers other payment options as well.

• Legal shops always have their own servers for downloads and never use external filesharing hosts.

• Do a so called whois check for the domain name. A trustworthy merchant will always use the full adress and real phone numbers in their contact details and no privacy protection service. Same for the website itself, there should be an “about us” page as well as “terms & conditions” and a “privacy policy”.

• Look at the domain name in the browsers adress bar. Distributors of illegal downloads often use keyword rich nonsense domain names like downloadcheapmusicherenow.info or similar. (Just an example, site doesn’t exist.) If the site itself redirects you at checkout or once you click a link, e.g. to Amazon, there is no need to be worried. It’s probably simply an affiliate website making money from referring customers to a big merchant.

With these details in mind, you are pretty safe from any scam or potentially illegal music download offers. In case you already are a victim, we’d advise you to report the copyright infringing website to the RIAA to avoid that even more people become a victim as well.