The Greed of Music Industry Executives and Declining Record Sales The music recording industry is in trouble. For several years now, sales of new and popular music have steadily declined and show no sign of changing. The record companies are quick to blame the growing popularity of the Internet; music is being traded in a digital form online, often anonymously, with the use of file-sharing programs such as Morpheus, KaZaA, and Imesh, to name a few. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) succeeded in disbanding the pioneer Internet file-sharing program, Napster, but is facing confrontation with similar programs that are escaping American copyright laws. While there is an obvious connection between declining popular music sales and increasing file sharing, there is more going on than the RIAA wants to admit. I will show that the recording companies are overpricing their products, and not sufficiently using the Internet as an opportunity to market and sell their products. I shall begin by describing in greater detail the problem that the recording companies are facing, as well as the growing epidemic of online music trading. From there, I will show the correlation between the two and describe the other factors affecting record sales, and how these trends could be turned around to help the industry. “The Record Industry is in trouble,” says Jann S. Wenner in an editorial appearing in a recent issue of Rolling Stone Magazine. “Album sales are now down almost 20% from two years ago, and the record business is facing the biggest retail slide since the Great Depression” (Wenner). People are buying less and less products released by the recording companies. “Nobody doubts that the music business is in trouble. Last year, global sales of CDs were down by 5% from 2000, the first fall since the format was launched” (NAPSTER R.I.P). The Nielsen SoundScan, used to report final sales to consumers, revealed some of its figures in a September 2002 issue of Billboard Magazine. “Nielsen SoundScan reports that overall music sales compared with the year before were off by 12.6%…while album sales were off by 9.8%. Total first-half units sold fell to 317.7 million units from 363.4 million; the number of albums sold slipped to 311.1 million units from 344.8 million – an 8.1% drop” (Garrity). Even the number of albums that become hits is... ... middle of paper ... ...election and convenience of P2Ps. Because of consumer’s tendency to download single songs by many varying artists, many may wonder if increased Internet use will eventually exterminate the record album from existence. Personally, I do not foresee the death of CDs and albums as a product. The MP3 format is not quite CD quality, and the singles that are typically downloaded by consumers do not always reflect the talent or best product of a certain performer. Singles are what will make money, but B-sides, the songs that people do not buy the CD for, are also a culmination of an artist’s hard work. B-sides make an album good or bad, and consumers simply do not download B-sides. I fear that buying an entire album will become more rare as these new programs emerge that allow consumers to buy one song at a time, but the album will prevail. Newspapers and Magazines are now available online, but they still appear for retail in stores and by offline subscriptions. Online music purchasing shows no signs of dropping, and the consumers show no sign of listening to less music. The industry just has to take the initiative to make the music more accessible to music listeners at a fairer price.
We have all watched over the last year and a half as the controversy over the digital music provider Napster has clogged our television screens and lined our floors in the forms of newspaper articles. We are also well aware of the implications and revenue losses that the service either directly or indirectly causes. What I am going to investigate more in-depth in this article is, more specifically, the effect that Napster has on the operations of record stores worldwide. I am going to try to describe the most profound effects that Napster has on this industry.
The music industry can trace its roots to the 18th century when classical composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart sought commissions from the church or aristocracies by touring to promote their music (Boerner). By the early 20th century, recorded collections of songs were available for purchase for home listening. Towards the middle of the century, record album production had become the norm for getting new music to the masses and album sales had replaced sheet-music sales as a measure of popularity, with the first gold-recor...
major record labels have been slow to embrace distribution over the Web because of the difficultly
The music industry is about selling the recordings and the performances of music among many individuals and organizations that works with musicians. The music industry has both the charm and the organizational architecture to affect the business and the cultural trends. There are millions of listeners and followers to the products of the music industry. The opinions of these listeners always change depending on what they see or hear. The music business or industries have been influencing generations of recording artists, business professionals and consumers. The music industries have been reinforcing questionable subject matter, music lyrics and business and social norms.
Pfanner, Eric. "Music Industry Sales Rise, and Digital Revenue Gets the Credit." Business Day Technology. The Nre York Times, 26 Feb 2013. Web. 21 Mar 2014.
Evans, Chris. “Napster, My.MP3.com, Digital Music, and the Future.” Online Article. March 28, 2000. http://www.netfreedom.org/news.asp?item=113.
The entertainment industry and many musicians regarded P2P as a big crisis for copyright, so that they sued the company that produced Napster. “Anger leads Metallica to the Internet,” an article by Karen Schubert in USA TODAY, noticed that heavy-metal band Metallica was suing Napster. And now some people in the music industry are fighting with a distributor of P2P software even in the Supreme Court, and lobbying to outlaw P2P technology. In “File sharing goes to High Court,” USA ...
The music industry is an ever-evolving revolutionary entertainment industry for the masses. Music provides entertainment to all different masses due to the variety of genres produced. Music is a very profitable and complex industry. Music has expanded to a worldwide industry for musical artist to express their art through the form of song to the masses. Music not only appeals to the ears but to every aspect of a person. Music allows for individuals to explore and let their imagination expand as they here a song. Throughout the years the industry has undergone dramatic changes. Whether it is genres, forms of how it is distributed, or even the impact the artist have had. The industry is diverse and ever changing as the years continue. In the past 20 years the industry has changed with help of the technological breakthroughs and adoptions.
The most significant down side to technology is the loss in revenue from album sales. Illegal downloading of music has become prevalent in today’s society, and many artists—major or independent—receive little to no profit from album sales. Many companies, such as Apple, have tried combating the issue with protected file formats, but a loophole has always been found to bypass the protection. Unsigned and independently signed artists hurt the most, as they pay almost everything out-of-pocket to produce their music. The only feasible response to the loss in revenue, artists have found, is to increase tour dates. In today’s age, it is not rare to find artists who tour more than eight months out of each year. Touring has become one of, if not the only, reliable source of income for many
Abstract: Relatively little attention has been given to the effect of digital music on amateur musicians and music distribution. Here, I examine the revolution on the horizon-sites such as MP3.com herald the eventual bridging of the gap between artist and listener while shrinking the record companies. In this paper I examine two such sites that host independent and labeled artists alike: the larger, better-known MP3.com and the smaller, independent, non-profit Songfight. I examine how they each handle the challenges of digital music and their attraction for artists while concluding that a change in the recording industry as we know it is forthcoming.
At the turn of the millenium, the music industry has been faced with an unforeseen phenomenon that has affected its very foundation - mass scale music piracy. The decline of CD sales in the past three years have been blamed on the availability of songs that can be downloaded from Internet sites and service providers like Napster, KaZaA and Morpheus free of charge. Today the issue of intellectual copyright infringement in music has been taken more seriously than ever before, as large record labels and companies like Sony and EMI struggle to maintain healthy album sales in the face of online music piracy. In addition, music piracy affects more than just the corporate world - it affects the very artists who create music and receive no compensation for their efforts. In fact ?many high-profile and buzz artists, including Eminem, Oasis and most recently 50 Cent, have seen their upcoming albums undercut by file-sharing online before their scheduled releases, prompting record labels to move up street dates to avoid losing album sales.? (Grossberg) In light of this, are a few positive aspects in the face of such widespread negativity but music file sharing continues to be a controversial topic in the world of music and the arts in general.
Although stagnant in recent years, there has been exciting events and key figures that have impacted the way of digital recording over the analog to digital timespan. While it’s true that MP3 file sharing has definitely revolutionized the way we make and listen to music, these things already have happened in the past. Both the radio and the VCR upset the traditional ways music was produced and circulated. Digital audio has come along way. From analog eight track recorders that use tape, technological advancements allowed people to use binary codes to create an infinite amount of tracks digitally. With digital audio up in the cloud, streaming, or overpowering physical album sales, digital audio has left a lasting impression in the music industry that will continue to improve and expand over time.
With the invention of the Compact Disc (CD) in 1984 the music industry was able to increase their record revenues again surpassing $4 billion. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), profits in 1988 increased up to $6.25 billion (Krasilovsky and Shemel, 2007). On one hand CD’s have proved to be very successful invention as it indicated that consumers are willing to pay for increased quality of goods and services. However on the other hand it had introduced issues relating piracy. Illegal reproduction of analog phonograph records was a relative harmless issue at this time, as the quality of sound would reduce by ea...
Steve Jones in the article "Music and the Internet" suggests that popular music as well as academic articles relating to popular music were created and distributed by people who didn’t completely understand the idea of the "music industry." He ultimately suggests that today compared to the introduction of popular music, a growing number of consumers are using the Internet to attain music. The internet has drastically changed the distribution systems also creating many ethical problems that weren't found in the music industry before the internet. Because the internet started making a presence in almost every single business, it was almost no question that the internet is bringing about some changes in the music industry; a billion dollar industry. Steve Jones ultimately knew the inversion of the internet would create dominant change in the music industry; one that many popular music artists during the early years didn't think was possible. The article was written in a lot information paragraphs that gave insight to the extreme lack of strong distribution during the early times of popular music compared to modern day. Strong and insightful syntax showed the way many musicians felt that about the way their music was performed and distributed during these times, but had nothing to do about it.
The music industry started in the mid 18th century with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Through the decades there has been a great increase in this industry; however, the revenues for this industry have declined by half in the last 10 years. This has been caused by music piracy, which “is the copying and distributing of copies of a piece of music for which the composer, recording artist, or copyright-holding record company did not give consent” . After 1980’s, when the Internet was released to public, people started to develop programs and websites in which they could share music, videos, and information with...