Changes In The Music Industry

1010 Words5 Pages

The advent of streaming music is just the latest chapter of innovation and change in the music industry. In this part this paper will try to give a short and concise overview of some of the most considerable changes and innovations in the music industry.
Traditionally before the invention of mediums for recorded music there were two main ways of earning money with music: giving a concert or selling sheet music. The sellers of sheet music easily dominated the music industry.
At the beginning of the 20th century recorded music became a new disruptive technology in the music industry. Commercially released phonograph records and radio broadcasting revolutionized the industry. In 1948 Columbia records introduced the 33 1/3 rpm LP record which …show more content…

Music consumers were paying less and less for the music they were enjoying. Illegal file sharing became a rampant practice for music consumers. The most popular means of illegal file sharing was Napster. U.S. revenues dropped by half from 1999 to 2009. This caused large-scale lay-offs, drove retailers out of business and forced record labels to consider new avenues of doing business. The music industry also took legal action and sued Napster in 2001 and succeeded in shutting down Napster. This however did not stop the decline in sales or illegal downloading and sharing of music. (Goldman, …show more content…

After 2010 services like Deezer, Pandora and Spotify began offering subscription based pay-to-stream music. With streaming music services one usually pays either a subscription fee to enjoy music without advertisements or bears through the advertisements to gain access to free music. The streaming service then pays out part of their revenues from subscriptions and advertising to the artists whose music is being offered for consumption based on the number of streams. This is the case with Spotify. This made sales and revenues of sold music in the industry decline even further. Especially in 2014 the impact of the most successful of these services (Spotify) can be felt considerably with music sales at an all-time low. Only one artist so far in 2014 sold over a million copies of an album. This is also the same artist who took her music off Spotify. However many artists and consumers alike criticize Taylor Swift for this move. They argue that streaming music is part of the future for musical artists and a stream of revenue. This shows that streaming music services like Spotify are very controversial (Standaard,