The Media's Influence On The Music Industry

The music industry is arguably one of the most interchangeable industries within society. The way music is produced and consumed has changed on numerous occasions over the past century and it is fair to say that the media has played a significant part in influencing those changes. Thus, the media artefact in which I will be analysing is perhaps the latest music platform to question the way in which we consume our preferred choice of music. Spotify is a digital music service that allows you to listen to any song from any artist online for free and to share your music tastes in the social networks. Its design and service reflects the consumer market at the time in which it was released in 2008, and has modified since then in order to conform

Despite this, public demand for music on the net began to gain pace partly due to the realisation that ‘CDs can lose data as the foil substrate beneath the clear plastic coating oxidises when this happens; the disc becomes dull and unreadable by the CD player or drive.’ (Friedberg in Harries 2002: 33). Furthermore, the discovery that ‘MP3 files are small enough to make it practical to transfer high- quality music files over the Internet and store them on a computer hard drive.’ (Shuker 2001: 65) established MP3 files and music online as the challenger to the CD platform of music consumption.

However, the legal implication of MP3 downloads, as explained by Anne Friedberg in 2002, hindered the progress of this platform in the music industry:

‘While MP3 technology could endanger the market hegemony of the pre-recorded CD in the same way that the CD threatened the Vinyl record in the early 1980s, this may not be the case. Currently, MP3 users are legally allowed to stream (that is, listen to songs online), but not download them to their hard drives.’ (Friedberg in Harries 2002:

Essentially, Spotify can be considered a social network for music, as stated on their official website: ‘And because music is social, so is Spotify. Share music on Spotify, Facebook, Twitter, your blog and via email. You can also follow other cool people – so when they discover music, you do too.’ (http://press.spotify.com/uk/information/ :accessed20/02/14) This is relevant in terms of social context considering that prior to October 2008, the social networks: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were growing in popularity and becoming a key part of society. Spotify’s use of synergy is a unique feature in the music industry, a feature which also helps indicate the demographics and psychographics of the youthful, possibly student aged target audience for