Online Music Sales and the Shift Back to Physical Media
Until 2013, the iTunes Store was the dominant online music marketplace. What changed? In the early 2010’s, iTunes started to face stiffer competition from fellow digital stores like Google Play and Amazon MP3, who offered music in an MP3 format: a less digitally restrictive file type than iTunes’ proprietary AAC format. At the same time, Spotify was setting up to become an industry gamechanger, and by July 2011, both Google Play Music and Spotify outranked iTunes in Google searches (see below).
Online sales of music would not go out with a whimper however, and other stores would rise by finding a niche market. One such digital marketplace is Bandcamp, which overtook iTunes in search popularity in February 2013. Bandcamp sells both digital and physical music that often cannot be found anywhere else, and many artists release music free of charge. Bandcamp focuses on music released by independent artists and labels, and allows it’s customers a wide range of formats, both lossy and lossless, for its customers, making it the only major service to sell lossless music other than Beatport. Beatport is esentially iTunes for DJs, offering a catalog of dance music purchasable in lossy or (for a premium) lossless formats. Beatport, though never as popular as Bandcamp, found success with the EDM craze of the turn of the decade, but has been losing relevancy as DJs are now implementing streaming music. The rising trend in vinyl sales over the past decade created a need for an online market to buy and sell physical media, a large niche that Discogs has filled quite comfortably, beating out Bandcamp in search rank 2016 and onward. Discogs serves as both a music database and marketplace, with users cataloging and trading rare CD’s and records. The physical nature of Discogs’ products makes it the most expensive of the online stores, but it’s comprehensive and ever-growing knowledge of music and the convenience of being able to search a digital marketplace for obscure records that one would otherwise have to dig for in a music shop or thrift store has kept it popular as other means of purchase have come and gone.
