Making Yourself Heard Online: The digital music industry
The Internet is fundamentally changing the way music is made, distributed and consumed. There are mixed feelings as to whether this is a good thing. Tech startups in the late ’90s / early ’00s, such as Napster and LimeWire, played both revolutionary and destructive roles in the development of the music industry. The peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms demonstrated a way for music fans to easily share digital music, a lot of the time without need of the original source. This kept fans happy, but not the artists and record labels whose music was being pirated across the web.
Music Streaming: Friend or foe?
Scroll forward 10 years and we have a (seemingly) more civilised digital music scene. The likes of Spotify, Rdio and even Napster now allow fans to legitimately stream and share music online. With 20 million users on Spotify alone, music-streaming services offer artists a platform to gain exposure to large audiences. (I know I personally use Spotify mainly to discover new artists or rediscover those that have somehow disappeared from my CD / iTunes collection.) But there’s a big debate among artists and record labels as to whether on-demand music services are friend or foe. Recent figures show that in order for a solo musician to earn the US minimum wage through Spotify they would have to tally up a mighty 4,053,110 plays per month. It’s these sorts of figures that are putting even the bigger players off online-streaming. It has been widely reported that the American singer Taylor Swift snubbed a number of on-demand services with the release of her new album ‘Red’. Other artists who delayed the release of material on streaming sites also include Adele and Coldplay.
DIY Downloads
If you are looking to distribute your music online but streaming isn’t for you, don’t despair. The digital download market in the UK is expected to hit £194m by the end of 2012 and currently makes up 44% of the Western Europe market. With the need for artists to make their music available across the web, the number of sites and services to help artists do just that is constantly growing. From DIY sites such as Bandcamp and Vibedeck that allow artists to sell directly from the site, to distribution sites such as Emubands and our Liverpool neighbours Ditto Music that push your tracks the all the big players in music downloads, online technologies are making it ever easier to make yourself heard online.
The future of music?
While the debate over best practice for digital music continues… Scott Borchetta, head of Taylor Swift’s label Big Machine Records, has been quoted as saying that music streaming “doesn’t make sense” for small record companies. But founder of XL Recordings, Martin Mills, believes “if we didn’t have digital we wouldn’t have a business”.. there’s no denying that, with physical music sales down 12% worldwide and online streaming expected to make £696m globally for the music industry, artists, labels and fans wanting to make, distribute and consume music in the twenty-first century need to get online.
Photo Credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc
