Many people ask if streaming music recording is legal. Let’s shed some light on it to find out if recording online audio streams is a real alternative to buying music downloads.
Audio streams can be found on many places on the Internet. Big Audio streaming sites like Grooveshark for example let you listen to your favorite songs for free. These sites are usually sponsored by advertisements, so that users won’t have to pay a fee for listening to online music. The question now is if a streaming music recording made out of these free streams is something legal or not.
There’s an ongoing debate in the online community whether or not ripping free online streams is legal or not. One could argue that recording audio streams is much like recording music from a regular radio, which would definitely be legal. People usually have the right to make a private copy of publically available audio and video for their personal use. But online audio streams are simple not radio shows, are they?
So is Streaming Music Recording From Online Sources Any Different?
Well that’s a good question. From a technical point of view it would be allowed to record online music streams just like you would with a regular radio for example. That means you would have to find a way to actually physically record the playing song to a mediumlike your hard drive for example. There’s is software available that is exactly doing this. It rips music streams while htey play in your browser. It actually records the incoming audio and saves it to disk.
A direct download of a streaming music recording would be a completely different field. In that case you would be actually stealing the music from the music provider since you would direct download a song from their servers. This is usually not allowed by the big music streaming sites and for a normal Internet user there’s no easy way to do it. Online music streams usually are provided by means of Flash or other browser plugins where a user has no insight into the actual source of the stream.
A streaming music recording isn’t something illegal unless you directly rip it from the music provider’s website by means of hacking the underlying script of the audio player for example. Recording the output of your computer’s audio hardware in a physical way instead is perfectly legal. A streaming music recording made in that way can be used for personally. You still won’t be allowed to share such music with other people or even sell songs you recorded.