Final Essay

The aim of this essay is to look in contemporary means of music distribution, and identify which is currently the most profitable and widely used, and why they are used and the effect they have on the music industry. This information will then be used to predict which method of distribution will survive the test of time, and potentially be the means of distribution that could still be in use 15 years from now. This essay will explore the profitability and popularity of three different platforms: vinyl records, digital downloads, and music streaming services.

Music piracy has been very problematic for the music industry since the age of vinyl records and cassette tapes (Berlatsky, 2013) (Gil, n.d.), though the problem really only became widespread

One artist who has been very vocal about her dissatisfaction with Spotify is Taylor Swift, who in late 2014 removed her entire catalogue of work from the streaming service. She claimed that artists are unfairly compensated for their work when their music streaming through a service such as Spotify, stating that artists earn between $0.006 and $0.0084 per song play (Ellis-Petersen, 2014). Other sources appear to back up her claims, with ‘The Economics Of The Popular Music’ claiming that 73% of the revenue paid by Spotify for the songs streamed, is kept by the record label, with only 11% going to the artist (Byun, 2016). At first it would appear that this proves Swift’s point, there is really no way to correlate the two statistics together, as the amount paid to a record label is not made public, because of this, a direct comparison cannot be made between the supposed 11% paid to artists, and the figures that Swift claims goes to

This links back to the idea that a ‘retro’ style is currently in fashion, however, trends come and go, hence in the 15 years the resurgence of vinyl records, and the ‘warm’ analogue sound, could be long over. Furthermore, the amount of music being purchased from online music retailers such as ‘iTunes’ is currently falling, with consumers favouring music streaming services (Ingham, 2016), where you can either listen for free, or pay a monthly fee to disable ads, as opposed to paying for individual songs and/or albums. The fact that the sales of vinyl records surpassed that of downloaded digital music isn’t really an indicator to show that vinyl records are currently taking over and becoming the dominant medium of music distribution, when compared to the amount of weekly revenue generated by music streaming services, vinyl records are still behind. Even with the supposed minimum $0.006 generated from each song streamed, music streaming