ABSTRACT
Major record companies claim that 360 deals are necessary if they are to survive in the current landscape where income from records alone has declined by half since its peak. Steve Jobs had famously negotiated licensing deals with all of the major record labels so that Apple could do what the music industry had failed to do: set up a legal and easy-to-use digital music store. While music lawyers who have plied their trade since the 20th century should remember the events that transformed the music business, many law students may have been children when personal. MP3s began creeping into the mainstream consumer consciousness with the 1997 launch of MusicMatch, a digital music jukebox software program that allowed users to "rip" their CDs into MP3 files, organize those files into playlists, and then play them through their computers. The popularity of Napster clearly demonstrated that tens of millions of consumers wanted to be able to download music from the Internet.
