Technology Could Bring About the End of the Music Industry as We Know It

1303 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Research paper on the impact of technology in the music industry

Is this the end of music as we know it? Of course not. For over 50,000 years (that we know of) music has been a part of our lives and it will stay a part of our lives until our apocalyptic end. But are we facing the end of music as an industry? Possibly. This question has been on the tip of musicians, industry insiders, and music mogul’s minds for the past few years. Why so scared? Well, through the eighties, nineties, and all the way up to the new millennium, the publics’ need for popular music was at an all time high; album sales were through the roof and world records were being broken. From Michael Jackson to Whitney Houston, Garth Brooks to Britney Spears, artists saw their work sell anywhere from ten million copies to a staggering thirty million copies. The people seemed to love the music (near 800 million albums sold per year) and we know the record execs loved the money. But with the latest technological advancements, we’ve seen those same artists have trouble getting their albums to sell even two million copies – and this has got the music market shaking in their boots. File sharing, new audio formats, music quality, and more have all been offered as theories to why the music market has declined so drastically. But which one is the real cause?

Everyone knows that sharing/downloading music off the internet is “unethical” and that there are potential risks involved - but as Americans, it’s difficult to not take advantage of a free thing and that is why we haven’t stopped downloading over 20 billion songs per year. The music sharing phenomenon took off in the late nineties, as the internet was becoming increasingly popular, and a peer-to-peer file sharing network called Napster debuted online and helped jumpstart...

... middle of paper ...

...ing options.

All these theories have somewhat contributed to the steady fall in album sales -2007 has seen some of the lowest sales in history and there seems to be no end in sight. As vinyl records lost popularity in nineties, physical CD’s are losing popularity now - which brings up one more question, what’s next? What seems to be the only way to save the music industry would be a new financial model; the industry needs to find a way to adapt to the growing demand in digital sales. Lowering digital single prices to 5 cents and digital album sales to 99 cents is a possibility. Finding a new technological advance is another. Either way, the music industry needs to find a way to get the people more involved and get them excited for music again as they were twenty years ago – which I’m sure in given time, they will do.

Long live the industry. Long live music.

Show More
Related

  • Let There Be Light: Did Punk Rock Really Make a Difference

    3161 Words  | 7 Pages

    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...

    Read More

  • Business And Social Norms In The Music Industry

    101 Words  | 1 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • The music industry-globalizing in many ways

    1788 Words  | 4 Pages

    The production and consumption of music has become a market of its own that has been growing and getting stronger every single day. Many companies have found their fortune in the music industry and have become part of the globalization by entering the worldwide market and economy.

    Read More

  • The Greed of Music Industry Executives and Declining Record Sales

    5423 Words  | 11 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • The Rise and Fall of Napster

    1294 Words  | 3 Pages

    Evans, Chris. “Napster, My.MP3.com, Digital Music, and the Future.” Online Article. March 28, 2000. http://www.netfreedom.org/news.asp?item=113.

    Read More

  • The Growing Industry of Electronic Dance Music

    1109 Words  | 3 Pages

    The current growth of the music industry is a result of the global popularity of EDM (Unknown, 2013). The DJ market has increased in popularity in past years as new technology has made it easier to become an entertainer (Vincent, 2013).

    Read More

  • The Future of P2P Technology and Music

    713 Words  | 2 Pages

    Since 1999, the situation around music has been changed drastically. In that year, the novel software “Napster” was released. With this software, people became able to get any file they want easily, sometimes illegally. Some musicians and people in the entertainment industry have tried to exterminate that P2P “Peer to Peer” technology. But it looks as if their efforts are in vain. People are going to use P2P technology more and it might as well become the official way to handle music distribution. The music industry should rather take advantage of the technology than keep trying to exterminate it.

    Read More

  • Effects Of Technology On Hip Hop

    1500 Words  | 3 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • MP3, Amateur Musicians and Music Distribution

    2456 Words  | 5 Pages

    In bridging this gap between artists and listeners, however, certain dangers arise. While the usual issues of artists attempting to protect their songs from copyright violations, scams, and unauthorized rearrangements3 arise, others issues need to be taken into account. These include the posting of offensive material, the posting of offensively bad material, and the relative inability to promote one's music without the help of outside agents or the website that hosts it. Not only that, but the money offered to artists by such sites is hardly significant, making it difficult for such sites to completely replace record companies. In this paper, I examine two such sites-MP3.com (which is a large, broad, for-profit site) and Songfight (a smaller, independent, non-profit themed site), and compare and contrast the advantages and pitfalls of each. In comparing and contrasting the two, we can see that the ubiquity of computing has not only created new options for amateur music distribution, but that it has begun to revolutionize music distribution as well.

    Read More

  • Technology And Change: The Effects On Music And The Artists Who Create It

    1660 Words  | 4 Pages

    Introduction: In the past, music has been a costly business, where only people with a lot of money could enter and be successful in the industry. Changes in the music industry, coupled with new computer technology, have made it much easier for people without a lot of money to compose, produce, and distribute their creations. In order to get a better understanding of the music industry in comparison to 2014, one has to look at its history. There were many things that happened from the 1980’s onward, and they brought on a significant impact towards the music industry.

    Read More

  • Digital Distribution And Music Industry

    1441 Words  | 3 Pages

    There are six key new market disruptions concerning the digital distribution of music: the creation of a new and broad customer base, the possibility of an annuity versus a per-unit revenue model, the gatekeeper advantage for a record company having proprietary access to a new digital distribution infrastructure, understanding of a technology that could be applied to other digital content, need for balance between physical and digital distribution strategies, the strategy the incumbent should adopt with respect to the evolving war over digital distribution standards. Was there a disruption or an evolution?

    Read More

  • Music Industry Essay

    1018 Words  | 3 Pages

    The music business entered a dramatic change in the 21st century. These changes appear in the way of how people access and consume music. According to Hull, Hutchison and Strasser (2011) the music business has developed throughout three stages. While moving from the agricultural age, where the music business made its revenues through live performances, troubadours and patronage, the industrial age introduced new innovations that were assumed to be associated with long-term economic growth. Commencing the year 1950 sound recordings experienced a drastic raise in sales by an average of 20% a year (Krasilovsky and Shemel, 2007). While the music industry was dominated by six major record lables (Time Warner, Disney, Vivendi Universal, Viacom, Bertelsmann, and News Corp.) (Hull, Hutchison and Strasser, 2011), further growth in the industry has been recorded in the 1970’s, where record sales “rose from less than $2 billion at the beginning of the decade to over $4 billion in 1978”, which took a sharp turn entering the Depression around the middle of the 20th century (Krasilovsky and Shemel, 2007:5).

    Read More

  • The Music Industry

    1171 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Music Industry

    1361 Words  | 3 Pages

    switch to digital music has brought about a new era which affects all aspects of

    Read More

  • Illegal Downloading "is" Stealing

    518 Words  | 2 Pages

    With the popularity of the Internet, sales for CDs, DVDs, Movies, and many other products have increased. Along with the increase of sales has brought forth an ever increasing problem of illegal media being downloaded. Programs such as Bittorent, Kazaa, and other direct-connect networking programs have allowed the transferring of such illegal media. Downloading song files from the Internet over a free peer to peer network is the moral equivalent of shoplifting music CDs from the local mall.

    Read More

More about Technology Could Bring About the End of the Music Industry as We Know It

Open Document