Entire industries have emerged to meet the demands of the growing music homepages. Evans states that music oriented Web sites are becoming like music video productions with writers, designers, directors and programmers. Fans have also created music homepages to share knowledge, opinions and gossip about the bands. Although the fans often include copyrited sound clips of bands on their personal homepages without permission, there have been virtually no cases of bands or record labels shutting down web sites. Bands and record labels are not threatened by these homepage sound clips because the technology makes it impractical to download an entire album onto a hard drive or floppy.
Current technology requires five minutes to download one minute of music.
At this rate it is not cost efficient for the user to spend several hours on-line at at average cost three dollars an hour to record an album. The second technological problem with pirating entire albums over the Internet is that the browser is unable to store or convert the music recording. The music must be encoded in order to play over the computer. An entire digitalized album sent over the computer would maximize most personal computer harddrives. It is unlikely that the user is willing to sacrifice an entire harddrive in order to store one album.