How has the digital era affected the Music Industry? The
answer to that question is that it has completely restructured how music is
consumed. The first introduction to the
digital era was when Steve Jobs introduced iTunes to the world. iTunes is the
first legal digital platform that consumers could purchase music by digital
download, either by a full album or a by song single. This definitely made a
major impact on the music industry because of the ability for consumers to
share music without having to pay for it. Peer to peer file sharing evolved
from digital downloading; this is what some may call pirating. As pirating
increased record sales decreased therefore putting a lot of major record stores
out of business.
The digital evolution also affected how music was produced.
For the past few decades’ music has been recorded in an analog format to
record, tape, and compact disk. With the evolution of digital recording the
technology would be innovated into computer software and then printed into a
digital format. With the emergence of the Digital Audio Workstation the
production process could be completed in a faster and cheaper fashion. With
these two major changes in how music is sold and produced it may have cause a
backlash on the record companies. Companies began to suffer from album sales
because of two factors pirating and the economy. This left little money in the
budget to support artist projects and forced the labels to make cuts in the
budgets and infrastructure. Major labels began to shut down and some even
merged with other labels to stay afloat. The digital era also has had a major
affect on the artist also. The artist is now in an era similar to the 70’s
where consumers are not interested in buy albums but purchasing singles. Artists
have had to become more creative to reach their potential fan base by utilizing
social networks for exposure. So it
seems that the digital era has hurt the Music Industry more than it has
actually helped it.
http://www.thecampuscompanion.com/off-the-record/2011/09/08/evolution-of-music-the-impact-of-digital-on-the-music-industry/
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