Final Essay

Digital music, at first glance, had been bad news to the music industry. The global revenues in 1999 of $38 billion had fallen to $16.5 billion in 2013, when the digital music had already surpassed physical medial and was bringing in the majority of the revenue. Also, at first, users could search for music files and download them for free; thus, the artists and labels were not being paid for the shared music. And, with the new technology and devices, that made everything easier to get the music that people wanted, it turned impossible to stop the digital music. Besides, as Daniel Ek, the founder of Spoty, said, “I realized convenience quite often wins… It’s not that people do not want to pay for music. (…)” Therefore, people usually prefer to use something that they have easy access and it is easy to use. However, if the industry work with the digital wisely, the digital might help the music industry.

Although in the beginning iTunes was only available for those with Mac computers, later, a support for Windows was added, expanding the potential customer base. Since its customer base grew, the service grew really fast and with 25 billion tracks been downloaded in 2013, besides, the catalog of 200,000 songs had expanded to 26 million. However, according to the case, Aplee claimed that the iTunes music sales didn’t provide significant profits for the company. Although it did not provide significant profits for Aplee, the iTunes was the begging of the use of digital to gain some