Investigating downloading goods and services

Music is a good that is in great demand to download – it is the only good that I download from the internet. Downloading has many advantages to physically purchasing goods;
• Firstly, downloading music from the internet means that you can choose one specific song – you don’t have to purchase the whole album – you cannot do this in shops.
• Also, the music can be sampled first – you can listen to sections of songs in order to see if you like the CD before purchasing.
• Downloading can be done at any time, making it more accessible than music stores which have certain opening hours.
• Users do not have to travel in order to buy – this saves them time and ultimately more money as they do not have to pay for a means of travelling to the store.
• Music can be retrieved almost instantly – the user only has to wait the downloading time, which is often much faster than travelling to a store, purchasing the CD and returning home.
• Also, downloading music makes importing onto different mediums such as Ipods and MP3 players easier as the music is just downloaded and saved to the computer – CDs have to be uploaded onto the computer, and then transferred to the device.
However, there are also many disadvantages;
• Songs can be lost if you do not back them up on a memory stick, CD etc – if the computer malfunctions, gets a virus or needs rebuilding, this will require songs to be backed up or they will be lost.
• If the music is downloaded from a non-safe source, the user can receive viruses that can greatly affect the computer. Furthermore, the quality of music from such places is usually worse than CD quality.
• Furthermore, extra items received when purchasing CDs are not given – lyrics and pictures in the album booklet, etc.
• Also, if the user buys every song on the album, this might end up saving them little or no money at all.
• Downloading can also be time-consuming – if you have a poor or slow internet connection, it can take several attempts or a lot of time in order to download the required song.