The Music Industry in the Digital Age free essay sample

The Music Industry In a Digital Age Table of Contents * Report Justification * Summary * Introduction * Main Body * Conclusion * Bibliography Report Justification As multimedia students we have become accustom to the changing technology around us. We are always at the forefront of fads and changes. In terms of music most people carry around with them an pod or some form of MPH player. In 2006 46. 6 million pods alone were sold by Apple. In the same year illegal downloads skyrocketed to 6 billion, a 47% Increase from the previous year.The available of free music and the move to MPH players show that there will soon no longer be any room for cads. Sadly this means that analog artwork will also be lost, unless artists provide a different means to gaining their artwork. This particular topic Is of interest to us as we have seen the transformation of the music tape, to cads and now MPH. We will write a custom essay sample on The Music Industry in the Digital Age or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Even back when tapes were popular people were still getting music for free. It was so easy to record songs off the radio onto tape. Perhaps as humans it was inevitable that we would always find a way of getting products for free.It seems like the music industry Is constantly changing and remains a very large part of our digital culture. Here Is a poll we took on faceable to find out Just how many people are still buying physical copys of their music. A total of 50 people took this pole. Only 2 people answered that they still buy vinyl, the same for buying cads and for downloading Illegally. So a huge 88% of people are downloading illegally. They commented on using such torrent sites such as shunt and pirates. Some people said they download directly off youth using various youth to MPH converters.Some people download off concluded. This is where artists upload their own music and can choose whether or not to make it a free download for people. The digital age has redefined the nature of work for many people the world over. The online revolution has changed the way we communicate, shop and seek entertainment. One industry that has been most effected by this is the music industry. From its beginning the music industry it has faced many new technologies that threatened its existence. With the invention of the phonograph in 1877 musicians feared that people would be discouraged from attending live references.Record companies feared that the introduction of music radio would kill record sales and in with the advent of the cassette in the asss it was not uncommon to see Home taping is killing music in magazines ads. With each technological innovation, music became more accessible and more lucrative than ever. By 1999 the music industry had become a $15 billion a year giant. This would be the last time the music industry would see such profits. Music is alive and well, even if the music industry is not.More people than ever before are listening to music, research shows that music consumers of today do not Penn less money on music compared to a decade ago, they simply spend that money differently, attending to more live events and music festivals than purchasing physical or virtual music. The knock on effect of digital music has made the music industry change its business model. Before the internet a hand full of large corporations controlled the industry, piping heavily marketed recordings by superstar artists through a few radio chains and Motto the public.Introduction In this report we are highlighting the fact that we no longer have to pay for music. Even small artists will know the effects of this once they put a song up on youth. We will address this issue at the expense of the artists who arent getting any income from their music being downloaded. At our own faults we are loosing out on what comes with the album. We no longer get the artwork, the lyrics and often we do not play the album in the sequence it was intended for. The availability of music now is making the impact of music far less. People often download from youth and what they get is terrible quality songs.Something that we often wonder in todays world is what is the point of having expensive headphones if you are going to use them for rebel quality downloads. In fact it is like a child that has too many sweets, eventually they wont be a treat anymore. Its true that many of us have so much songs in our tunes library that there may be some music that we have never even listened to. Although album artwork is available digitally like on the tunes store. What you get is the cover picture and many people who download illegally will not get a cover album with their music. People are less aware of what they are listening to now more than ever.We find out if there are ways and means of bringing back artwork to the people. Original artwork seems more at home now in art gallerys themselves. In general musicians will have to work a lot harder with gigs and shows to make a living. At the same time more people would go to shows as more people Nil have access to their music. Main Body: ere industry Record stores are seeing huge losses in sales due to the availability of free music. HIM are the biggest retail chain in Ireland for music. In 2004 they pulled out of the US Market due to lack of sales. CD sales in general declined by 50% between 2000 and 2009. Cads will soon be obsolete.However there seems to be a niche market for mainly sales. Vinyl sales seem to be on the increase. So far in 2012 we have seen an increase of 10% in vinyl sales. There are various reasons why people still use record players. It gives a sense of nostalgia that is lost in todays world of technology. The sound quality is incomparable to MPH songs. A record player is tangible, this idea of substance is something we are trying to bring back to the technology we use everyday. Some people Just like to be retro. Anapest 1999 saw the launch of Anapest, the first peer-to-peer music file sharing service, the beginning of global online music piracy.Anapest provided users with a platform here they could share their music for free. This of course snowballed until the music industry took action and shut Anapest down in 2001. But the seed had been planted. Copycat file sharing sites began popping up across the Internet, which soon became the bit-torrents we know today. From 1999 to 2009 the music industry saw a decrease in revenue from $15 Billion per year to $6. 3 Billion. With the advent of MPH players and a computer in every home there was no doubt that digital music was here to stay.New Technology has meant that more people are listening to music Han ever before, this has lead to record companies no longer maintaining full control over the artist/industry. The internet has made it possible for artists to market directly to the consumer who can obtain the artist content for free or for a nominal fee. Torrents Torrents are hugely to blame for the fall of analog music sales. They are unpopular Ninth copyright authorities but much loved by millions of users around the world. Torrent networking is the most popular activity on the Internet today.Today there is an amount of safety apparent when downloading torrent files. Users will usually Nard you if a file is fake or corrupt. No single person benefits from the profits of torrent success as it is open-source, advertising-free, and Edward/sparer-free. Pirates. Org is one of the largest torrent sites. To avoid police raids The Pirate Bay has migrated operation from its physical servers to the cloud. Even if law the end as a spokesperson for Pirate Bay explains. If one cloud-provider cuts us off, goes offline or goes bankrupt, we can Just buy new virtual servers from the next provider. Downloading music like torrents is helped by widespread high speed WI FL. In Rainbows he release of Arrowheads album In Rainbows shocked people as the release was only announced a week beforehand and it was completely free. The individual was given a choice to make a donation for the album download or to download it for free. Although many people downloaded it the average value of each album came to EH. ere album gained so much attention because bands that are as successful as Radioed are never seen to be giving away their product for free. This is much unlike artists such as Metallic and DRP.Drew who rant about torrents saying that people shouldnt be getting music for free. It gave Radioed complete control over their product as it didnt go through any record company. Other bands started learning from this. Trend Rezone, the lead singer of Nine Inch Nails, liked this idea so much he donated $5,000 towards the album. Nine Inch Nails brought out an album free to download soon after this and The Raconteurs started releasing music only a eek after it was announced. This creates much more excitement and anticipation than a very long release.Another point about In Rainbows was that none of the songs were even released as singles beforehand. This act gives us a lot of insight as to what might come of the music industry in terms of distribution in the future. No room for discs ere compact disc is almost obsolete. A lot of laptops and desktops are being made without disc drives. This includes notebooks, Apples new macro pros and soon to be imams. These laptops are a lot thinner and lighter although some people may be cautious about buying if they dont have a disc drive.Most of us today rarely use our disc drives, so it isnt much of an Issue but rather a natural progression. In fact everything that takes discs will soon be gone. The new Oxbow will have no disc drive, instead a storage card will be used and everything will be downloaded. The day of the CD player is gone and replaced by the docking station, Bluetooth and WI FL connected speakers. Even your home hi FL system works as a dock or as a Nerveless system. Cd players are still available in pawn shop and other second hand shops. People still have CD players lurking in their homes usually Just for a spare radio in the garage or kitchen.As MPH players soon replaced personal CD players, docking stations are soon to completely replace CD players. Music promotion There is more and more movement towards free music entertainment for people. Promotion nights such as Murphys Big Night Out and Heinlein Live Project are well Inebriates for free and people are then chosen at random to receive the tickets for these events. They take place all over the country. Its not Just alcohol companies taking advantage of such advertisement. These type of events have become Increasingly popular in the past few years. TV channels such as MATT made their secret gigs quite popular.The key is to advertise the band beforehand but not the time and place until the last minute. In fact in the Scott Pilgrim movie the whole aim of the movie is to get to a secret gig, which the group of friends Just found out about. A few ways in which people are contacted would be by text message or email. It gives the spotlight to the organizers or the company involved but more importantly the musician. Today a more chaotic brand of self-marketing has emerged, fueled by Twitter, Faceable, Concluded and Youth. The roles have changed; the artist is now has more control than ever before.With the advent of relatively low cost recording technology it is possible to record, master, distribute and promote music from ones terror. Music created by smaller, less known artists is almost seen as a promotional tool to entice audiences to their live shows. Larger, better-known artist are now spending more time on the road than in the studio. A great emphasis is placed on the live show with stage setups becoming more elaborate, artists such as Ammo Dobbin, Archie Haitian, Nicolas Ajar and Tremolos create rich multimedia visual installations to entice concertgoers. He digital age has also changed the way in which the consumer is involved with the medium; no longer a faceless marketing demographic to which products are sold; hey have become more like co-conspirators with the artist. They have become viral advocates for artists, sharing music across their social networks, promoting new and obscure genres, participating in remixes and videos, and in turn helping shape artists careers. Theyre invested in music personally in a way that wasnt possible a decade ago. In a surprising shift, vinyl records have seen a 60% rise in sales in the past 4 years.Since the beginning of digital music vinyl advocates have expressed their distaste for the sound quality from the compressed lousy MPH format. This raises the question of yuccas music vs. digital. Consumers seem to have no qualms with investing in vinyl, as its a tangible, physical artifact that they own. ere Future of the Industry/Conclusion En are beginning to see a legal subscription trend within both the online movie industry and the music industry. As cloud technology evolves it is believed that there Nil be less emphasis on storing digital content on machines that Spottily is the subscription powerhouse of the modern music industry.Subscribers pay a small anti-piracy artists such as Metallic and 1. 12 have featured on the site since its beginning in Sweden in 2007. Spottily has become the worlds second largest contributor to major music labels topped only by tunes. Spottily allows the user to create and share playbills with people who subscribe to the service. You can also access your account from their smartened app, making hoarding of digital music on [Our personal machine a thing of the past. At this stage its impossible to predict the end of piracy, with the very nature of bit torrents it will be next to impossible to stop the free-for-all online music market.The music industry will have to change its model if its to generate sizeable revenues from chital music in the future. Record companies that release content on vinyl have begun offering customers digital rewards for supporting the analogue medium, whether its a piece of digital art, unreleased material or a digital copy of the album Just purchased, its a pretty progressive step. This model could also be adapted to merchandise, unique download codes attached to band memorabilia where the consumer can access musical content. En will never see another group as big as the Battles, 1. 12 are probable the last global powerhouse band.