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.

The advantages of streaming media for artists

Online streaming or tube websites offer artists a platform to easily reach a huge crowd of possible listeners or watchers without any big investments or the requirement of costly promotion. The quality requirements are lower, so gifted artists with limited technical abilities to record their music can publish it even if a major record label would reject the demo tape.

Another important advantage is copyright protection, at least to some extend. When music or videos are streamed over the internet temporary files are stored on the computer of the internet surfer, but these files can’t be loaded on a MP3 players or be written to any other media like CDs or DVDs. Therefore streaming offers at least some protection, as long as some basic principles or data security and streaming security are implemented.

Last but not least it’s a very fast way of publishing and distributing. Getting the word spread over the internet is much easier than via old fashioned media. Once media content is put online, it can instantly be accessed by theroretically everybody with an internet connection, independant from any broadcasting times.