The Web Music FAQ

What’s the difference between streaming and downloading?

There are two ways to listen to music on the web: Streaming and Downloading. When you download a song, you take an entire audio file that contains a complete song, and put it on your computer. 

When you stream songs off the internet, you receive what you hear in real time, so the entire song is never on your computer all at once. This is usually free and also saves a lot of disk space, provided you have a fast internet connection. With slower connections, the sound can be uneven and jerky. If you stream the song you also can’t transfer it to a portable MP3 player or put it on a CD. 

Web radio is a continuously streaming broadcast, so when you “tune in” what you hear streaming is what is being heard by everyone listening to that station at that time. Some web radio is just the broadcast of a standard radio station on the internet, while music portals like 365live.com provide ongoing streams of music, usually based on genre. Our own All Indie Radio is a good example of this.

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