Music is the art of combining vocal and/or instrumental tones in a structured manner.

Music has been around almost as long as the earth is old. We can designate medieval music as a beginning, although a precise time is impossible because the knowledge of that time period is too vague.

However, in the 1100s large volumes of written, notated polyphony and non-liturgical Latin songs began emerging before two major changes began to take place.

a) The use of the interval of a third as a stable harmony.
b) Humanistic orientation to text with music.

These changes took several decades, putting the beginning of the Renaissance somewhere between the 1420s (harmonies of Dufay) and the 1500s (humanistic texts of Josquin), which brings us to the beginning of opera in the 1600s. The Renaissance style ended around 1750 and is also among the clearest divisions of Western music.

Sometime in the early 1700s through the late 1800s, the best known pieces of European Classical music were written.

The 1800s was the beginning of a new era, because of a brilliant man by the name of Thomas Edison. This man was an exceptional inventor, on 12-6-1877 he finished one of his best inventions...The phonograph and had it patent on 2-19-1878. Now mind you it was a fairly complicated machine, using a metal cylinder with tin foil wrapped around it. The machine had two diaphragm-and-needle units, one for recording, and one for playback. When he spoke into a mouthpiece, the sound vibrations would be indented onto the cylinder by the recording needle in a vertical groove pattern. Edison gave a sketch of the machine to his mechanic, John Kreusi, to build, which Kreusi supposedly did within about 30 hours. Edison immediately tested the machine by speaking the nursery rhyme "Mary had a little lamb" into the mouthpiece, and to his amazement, the machine played his words back to him.

Now, we are going to get a little closer to the twentieth century of music in time in the 1900s. Starting in the beginning of the 1900s, there were disks (no, not CD's yet) used by recording studios to record music. These discs called records were then sold in stores for consumers to purchase and take home to play on their (phonograph) record player. The last of the records to come out was the 45 made for single songs.

It took the music industry decades to advance from the 45 record to new formats, such as 8-tracks and audio/cassette tapes. Once they were created it seemed as if the industry took off and overnight the CD (molded plastic disk scanned by a laser beam for digital data) was "born". These, like the record were, and still are, sold in stores for customers to purchase and take home to play on their CD players. Following shortly behind is the Mp3 player(standard technology and format for compressing audio signals into very small computer files. Sound data from a CD is compressed to 1/12 the original size) and ipod (portable Mp3 player).

Now, the pace has picked up even faster and we can download music right off the internet. In the beginning though, a company (I'm not going to mention any names) was allowing people to download as many songs as they chose for free. But, there was a problem..It was not exactly legal. A computer company names Apple made the process legitimate by allowing the artists to get paid for their work. The music industry now has the opportunity to license and sell it's content over the internet. The idea that people would pay for downloading music seemed a bit far fetched in the beginning. But, music sales have gone down by one-fifth since the millennium and downloads increased to over 500 million by July of 2005.

A revolution in the music industry was changed dramatically on February 23, 2006 when a 16 year old, Alex Ostrovsky came home and downloaded a song from the Coldplay concert he left just minutes before. Alex down loaded one of the songs for 99 cents from the iTunes Music store (which the Apple computer company started less than 3 years ago). Shortly after that an Apple employee called to let him know he has just downloaded the ONE BILLIONTH song. For being the lucky downloader, Apple Computer Company is sending him a $10,000.00 gift card for the iTunes Music Store, a 20-inch iMac, 10 ipods, and a scholarship to the Juilliard School in New York.

The "one billionth download" should go to show you how much this industry has taken over the music world over time!