RESEARCH: Music Industry Today

In the last 10 - 20 years, music has significantly changed in every form. The way music in produced, distributed and exchanged between users has dramatically changed in recent years due to many factors.
Production of music:

An example of a music keyboard on a music
creation software. Music can be digitally
created eliminating the need for a physical
instrument.

The production of music compared to just 10 years ago has significantly changed. The methods involved in producing music in this modern day is completely different to how they would of created music a decade ago. The reason for this is due to the advancement of technology. Technology has played a big part in the way artists now produce music. The introduction of powerful computers in recent years has switched the way in which artists create music. A decade ago, the majority if not all the music back then had been produced using real physical instruments recorded on a microphone and edited together. Today, computers have become so advanced that the majority of music is created on a computer. Music creation softwares are so widely available that music has now switched more towards computer generated sounds such as SFX. Professional computer programs have many thousands of pre-recorded sounds which the user can drag onto the timeline and create any type of music themselves. Music has switched more from a recording studio to an office desk where a few hundred pounds worth of equipment is all that is needed to produce a brilliant piece of music instead of thousands of pounds worth of equipment. Music programs also have digital keyboards implemented in the software. This allows the artist to pick what instrument he/she wants and using the on-screen keyboard, can produce any type of music or sounds they want. This eliminates the needs for physical instruments in a recording studio anymore as of it can be done literally through a click of a few buttons.


Distribution:
Over the last few decades, many things have changed in the music industry in terms of the way music is now distributed. In recent years, the record industry has been seeing a major decline due to many forms of piracy thanks to digital music. The music industry is currently dominated by the big four distribution companies. These are Sony, EMI, Universal and Warner Music. These four companies are all involved in international trading, as they do not only focus on music; they focus on all types of multimedia varying from producing films to selling technology. "The Record Industry’s Decline" is an article which thoroughly examines the causes of the decline in the record industries. According to the article, (posted in June 2007) there has been significant changes which has altered the way record industries operate contributing to their overall decline. An example of this is overall CD sales which plummeted 16% from January 2007 to June 2007. That change has come after 7 years of near-constant erosion. Change has been noticed in the activity of the music industry where Linkin Park’s new album sold 623000 copies in its first week in May 2007, but wasn’t enough to help fund Warner Music label (Linkin Park’s record company) who announced that they are to release 400 workers in the same month.

The music industry has been struggling to reinvent their business models and although they have large assests, they are not capable of making money from them. This is due to the technology over the years which has turned fully digital meaning the physical attributes of playing music (such as a cassette) now obsolete. Although CD’s are still widely available and are the only physical means of playing music (with cassettes and mini discs currently outdated) the majority of mainstream music has moved digital. This allows easy access for users to edit, create and distribute music thanks to the connectivity of the internet. As music is mainly digital, anyone with a PC is able to buy one copy of a CD or song from the internet and distribute it thousands of times for free. The majority of people like to gain access to music for free and with the introduction of Youtube in 2005, the music industry is forever failing to deal with the illegal copyrighted material being uploaded on the website everyday. Rewind the clock back to a decade ago, and they only way you were able to listen to music was through the radio, TV, cassettes and the then newly introduced CDs. Step forward 10 years and the way we listen to music is different. The introduction of the way we communicate online has led to a new way we listen to music through the likes of Youtube, Facebook, Spotify, RSS feeds etc.... These sources of music are all most free, with full unlimited access to basically anyone who has an internet connection.

An example of this is GrooveShark.com. This website allows users to upload songs they had purchased themselves for everyone else to listen to it for free.

GrooveShark.com allows anyone to go onto the website and listen to most music for free. It is literally an online playlist of any possible song you wish to listen to. Websites like these are an example of the way we can easily access music. All you need is a fast enough internet connection to stream the music and you've got unlimited access.

Exchanging music:

Thanks to the internet and the ability to easy make copies of digital forms of music, exchanging music is as easy as it has ever been. The ability to regularly download music free of charge from websites offering the content you wish to acquire has led to widespread piracy. The major website which first kicked this off was  Napster which was an online music peer-to-peer file sharing service created by Shawn Fanning. The service operated between June 1999 and July 2001. The technological advancements present then thanks to Napster allowed people to easily share their MP3 files with other participants. This meant they bypass the established market for purchasing such songs and thus leading to massive copyright violations of music. Although the original service was shut down by court order, it paved the way for decentralized peer-to-peer file distribution programs, which have been much harder to control. 

Napster paved the way for copyrighted content on the internet

The music industry has had many changes from the way music is distributed to the way music has is being pirated. The recent change in technology over the last 20 years has significantly transformed the music industry; from the times where the first portable music player was released, to the present where portable music is the only form of music. In the rise of the 1970’s the introduction of the cassette brought portable music to the world; this boosted sales of music in the music industry as people had the freedom to take their tunes wherever they want with them. However this caused problems as people were able to use cassettes to their own advantage and record music they did not own. The most common was people recording music from public radio stations. This was the birth of piracy as people were able to record specific tunes they wanted and either kept it themselves (meaning they did not spend money buying the music officially) or they sold it on for a profit, losing sales for record companies.

The way record companies and artists are getting around this problem is through the use of heavy advertisement and long concert tours. Currently, artists and record companies are making no profit what so ever from making a song and distributing it.

Advertisements on music videos online is a way of making money as artists and record labels are losing money on just songs alone.