Technology's Role In Killing The Music Industry

1491 Words6 Pages

Lucas Rugar
Lara Hubel
ENG 201
30 September 2014
Internet Research Essay
Technology has changed just about every industry that it touches, and the American music industry is no exception. From listening to music, to buying it, to recording it, technology has shaped almost every major aspect. Technology has many perks when it comes to music, but in many cases, it blinds us to what we are sacrificing in the process. From both the fans’ and artists’ perspectives, technology has played a big role in killing the traditional music industry; loosely defined as the industry from the 1950s, to about 2004, when it dissolved into the industry it is today.
For the artist, the old school industry provided one, very routine, route to the top. You had to …show more content…

Their intentions seemed fair, to supply digital downloads the legal way, giving money back to artists, record labels, etc.. However, their interests couldn’t have been any further away from keeping the music industries sales traditions. They sold songs as singles, even if they were not previously released as singles. Although Napster allowed this, it got shut down not long after it’s introduction and many people were still legally buying the albums. The popularity of this was many upcoming artists’ nightmare. Now, all of a sudden, if you don’t have a popular single, your other music might not ever be listened to. iTunes even filters the songs out by popularity, to make sure you can only buy the ones that have been marketed the best. Imagine listening to just “Money” from “The Dark Side of the Moon” and not bothering to buy the rest of the album because it wasn’t “fit” for radio play. Just like that, music was devalued in many ways. Artists had to start making songs that were appropriate for the radio so they could sell singles. The radio has a very simple formula, so popular songs started sounding very alike, hence why the genre “pop” had an entirely new definition at the start of the 21st …show more content…

With a few clicks, you can have hundred of songs carried with you on a portable, sleek looking device. This was a convenience improvement from the portable CD player. The downside to the new mp3 player revolution was, of course, the mp3 file format. Through the process of making it possible to carry hundreds of songs on a device, the files had to be compressed. Compressing a complex song with many dimensions, such a “A Day in the Life”, is like making the Mona Lisa black and white, and, unfortunately, there was not enough demand for sound quality improvements, and mp3 became the way of the