Digital Music Revolution (Essay Sample)

Digital Music Revolution
Student’s Name
InstitutionDigital Music Revolution
The digital music revolution has started slightly before the turn of the millennium. This revolution expanded the possibilities of both content creators and distributors. Increasingly, sophisticated technologies have been invented since the transformation of music recording industry. Despite this fact, digital music revolution has also intensified the controversies surrounding intellectual property and copyright management. The following essay investigates how digital music has revolutionized the industry and how the resultant online music stores have progressed. The analysis shows that the digitization of music has been beneficial to artists, as it has increased the volume of their music sales and the prospective customer base. It also shows that online music stores are doing quite well, especially iTunes, which continues to dominate the sub-sector. The future, though, lies in streaming of music files as internet penetration increases.
Digital music revolutionized the industry due to the existence of limitless opportunities that were not envisaged before (France, 2008). Before the turn of the millennium, artists that wanted to record and sell their music had to have deals with recording labels. The recording label would then buy the compact discs or alternative media that would carry the content in bulk. A distributor would then be contracted to distribute the recorded materials to retail stores (Schneider, 2014). Digital music eradicated or mitigated most of the above problems. The revolutionary recording technology means that artists can record on their own with minimal expenses. In addition, the production costs reduce significantly. The artists can also use such digital content distributors as online music stores to make their music available virtually to everybody.
Most importantly, digitization of music has made it more accessible (Paul, 2010). Consumers can now access music files instantly and with minimal hassle. Furthermore, the playing field for artists has been leveled. The internet is crucial in distributing power to those who would not have any in the physical sense (Boyajian, 2010). Right now, it is possible to listen to and purchase an excellent song from an unknown artist, because the song has been displayed in an online music store. This development would have been improbable if the same songs were sold through cassettes or CDs. Fewer people would have chosen them. This development has resulted in the proliferation of copyright infringement with instances of piracy increasing fifty times after 2000 (Sinha, Machado & Sellman, 2010).
The upside of the digital music revolution is that it has increased the variety of content. Digitized music is easy to distribute and also saves on space. Digitized music is also accessible to a larger audience especially if distributed through online music stores (France, 2008). The physical content distributors who used to contract retailers are slowly being phased out. The future of music is online. The internet has revolutionized consumer access and music experience. With continued proliferation of the Internet, the artists will increasingly move online to meet and socialize with their fans. In digital stores, artists can sell directly to their fans. With time, the physical content distributors will become irrelevant (Boyajian, 2010). The last major upside is that digitized music is now available in a myriad of platforms such as iPods, mobile phones and personal computers.
The downside of this digitalization is reduced income of the artists. Digital music sales over the Internet amount to only half of what cassettes and CDs sold, from US$ 14 billion to 7 billion (Moreau, 2013). For artists, digital music revolution has also increased competition. It is now harder to attract attention to the particular artist. The artist has to be a big-wig in the music industry or hope that consumers stumble upon his product by accident. Many online stores offer their music files in MP3, which is a format of lower quality. The original recorded files are of greater quality and higher resolution, even though they are larger and require quality technology (Schneider, 2014).
Moreover, digital music revolution has increased instances of copyright violations. There is a lot of illegal file sharing sites that promotes piracy. The law has been unable to counter the threat due to its unreceptiveness to technological advancements (Boyajian, 2010). Such fundamental concepts as fairness have been expanded to accommodate the rapidly changing technology reasonably. In fact, the fortunes of artists have been hurt. The only way to defeat copyright infringement is through the concerted efforts of Internet search engines and content creators. If the websites promoting piracy are given lower priorities by search engines, they will become invisible, and the instances of piracy will be reduced.
Online Music Stores
Online music stores appeared as a consequence of the digital music revolution. The digitization of music files expanded the ways they could be sold. At first the distributors tried to resist changes by using a wide variety of mechanisms to prevent copyright infringement, such as digital watermarks, but they turned out ineffectual. Online music stores are websites that store and sell digital audio files (Schneider, 2014). They provide sampling options, which allow the customer to listen to audio files in order to make purchase decisions. For a long time, the primary selling model has been the pay-per-song model. However, with increased competition, the subscription model where one pays a fee for a specified time to access a specified or unlimited number of files is now becoming popular (Moreau, 2013).
Online music stores have increased in popularity since Napster introduced the idea in the year 2000. However, Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing site that was considered illegal because it encouraged copyright infringement. Apple Inc. was the first to set up an online music store, the iTunes Store, later known as iTunes Music Store (France, 2008). Since then many online music stores have been established. This growth is attributed to the consumer base that feels increasingly comfortable buying music online.
The proliferation of online music stores shows that they are profitable and are doing well. For example, iTunes has sold more than 5 billion audio files since its inception (Schneider, 2014). Currently, it has a catalog of more than 8 million songs. Its close competitor, Amazon MP3, has sold nearly 3 million audio files and has a catalog of 5 million songs. Other upcoming online music stores such as Bandcamp, Beatport, eMusic and SoundCloud, each have more than 3 million songs in their catalogs (France, 2008). They sell an upwards of one million every year and offer increasingly useful platforms that enhance interactivity. At the moment, online music stores enjoy the confidence of the artists, and their revenues are constantly improving.
As noted earlier, iTunes remains the leader among online music stores (Schneider, 2014). This leadership may be attributed to the fact that it has been in the industry longer than its competitors. At the beginning, it has enjoyed the monopoly until 2007, when Amazon has started Amazon MP3 (Paul, 2010). Amazon has not been able to rival iTunes in terms of sales or revenue. Amazon generates around US$ 2 billion from online music sales, whereas iTunes makes US$ 6.9 billion (Schneider, 2014). These statistics constitute around 65% of the total online music sales.
However, it is important to note that iTunes’ dominance is quickly fading. The trend can be attributed to increased competition from other online music stores that are proving more attractive conditions. One of the contributors to this dominance has been new well-designed and effective interface. It offers a variety of options and is easily navigable. Other better designed online music stores have come up. For instance, Bandcamp...