The Internet's Effect on Music

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The past few decades, the internet has really changed the way music exists in our everyday lives. It changed the accessibility, it changed record sales, and in my opinion, it changed appreciation. As technology and the internet continue to only increase and become more prominent in our everyday lives, I can only imagine what future effects it will have on music. As it is, the music industry can't seem to keep up with this new advanced world. The first issues that the internet brought into the music world is illegal downloading and music sharing sites and now issues regarding music streaming and how that affects the pay of artists and labels.

With all this negative association that the internet has created in the music industry, there are still some positives. Since the music is easily accessible to the public, it opens doors for independent musicians to create an audience for themselves without the guidance of a recording label. People involved with indie music, love the internet for this reason.

Let's take a closer look:

The Negatives:

- The internet era is making it easy for people to steal music, or cheaper to access it in general which is making it hard for the music business to gain revenue because of all the technology.

- People who are part of making a record get paid in the form of royalties, so when music goes from person to person without any money involved, the royalties are unable to be paid.

- Itunes and Amazon have helped make this issue better by allowing people to buy individual songs rather than spending money on the whole album, which people are more likely to do, but it is still not generating enough money in the long run that is needed.

- Steaming services like Spotify and Pandora were created to get people to pay to use the service to generate some money, or getting money from ads, but currently artists and labels do not like this method because the money outcome is still way less than if a person bought the music. It will take a long time to fix this issue.

The Positives:

-Good for independent artists because they can get their music out all around the world without paying a record label.

- Music fans have a lot of access to music so they can enjoy it by just a touch of a button and at their convienence.

[Source: recordingconnection.com]

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