Digital Technology In The Music Industry Case Study

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE MUSIC INDUSTRY IN THE ADVENT OF MEDIA CONVERGENCE

Remember Napster, the first peer-to-peer file sharing service found in 1999 that raised a ruckus in the music industry? Through Napster, web users copied digital recordings that thousands of other users could copy for free, ultimately creating “a copying frenzy” (Rose, 2000). The birth of digital file sharing created uproar in the music industry as the opportunities for piracy escalated (Freedman, 2003). Contrary, this forced the music industry to retaliate; causing monumental changes in the way music was created, formatted, distributed and consumed. Digital technologies and the Internet transformed the traditional structure of activities in the music industry’s supply chain that followed content creation, production, promotion, distribution and consumption into a digital, interactive, multifaceted and collaborative model in which content creation, engagement and distribution between content

This ultimately altered the conventions of music consumption and contributed to new listening culture based on peer-to-peer exchanges rather than corporate structures (Freedman, 2003, p. 173). Consequently, this forced all record labels “to adopt internet technologies, to create a richer and more fully featured web sites, and to experiment with electronic forms of distribution that are either proprietary or in other ways non-threatening” to alleviate potential damage from media technology (Easley, 2005, p. 165). Universal Music Group successfully addressed the changes brought by media convergence by modifying their traditional business model to adopt the paradigm shift and facilitate the digital media culture (Universal Music Group,