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Wordbnd.com - Without a doubt the single most influential agent of change
in business trends in the last ten to twenty years has been the internet. There is virtually no business segment or
market that has gone unchanged by this powerful force. But of all of the various businesses impacted
by cyberspace, the music industry has to the one that has seen the most
dramatic change and the greatest challenge to keep up, adapt and survive an
onslaught of change unprecedented in its history.
The first major challenge that cyberspace brought to the
music business was a complete shift to how music would be sold to music fans
worldwide. In what can only be described
as an avalanche, the music buying public virtually abandoned conventional
record stores and retail outlets and took the majority of their music
purchasing business online. But this
mass influx of business could not be tracked to any one web site that was
executing the revolution. Because of a
revolution in how bands and Indie record labels do business online, the music
audience followed and began buying their CDs and even concert tickets directly
from artists or record labels online and getting those products instantly via
downloads.
But as drastic as the market changes this paradigm shift in
consumer behavior represented, it was nothing compared to what the internet had
in store for the music world. The next
wave of change represented a threat to the music business so serious that it
had the potential of putting the music industry out of business forever. When music consumers began to share digital
music electronically over the internet using file sharing software such as Kazaa,
Limeware and BitTorrent, suddenly it was possible for a music customer to
access all the music they wanted for free by simply downloading this music from
another internet user’s computer.
The plummet in music sales as result of these two forces was
drastic and traumatic to the music world in general. At first, the music business executives were
at a loss of exactly how to go about stopping the widespread file-sharing
phenomenon. They tried to shut down the
software services that provided the networks to users with lawsuits and other
punitive actions. These litigations took
a long time and cost a huge amount of money and all the while the flood of free
music going out over the internet continued to increase. Worse of all, when they did slow down one
file sharing network, it seemed many more cropped up to replace it which began
to look like a nightmare scenario of constant lawsuits against a never-ending
and constantly growing enemy.
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Public pleas to the music loving public were another attempt
to appeal to the conscience of the music world that if artists could not get
paid, there would be no more new music.
But the opposite seemed to be the case.
As more and more Indie musicians began to capitalize on file sharing and
using it as a method of marketing, the quantity and quality of good music only
seemed to increase in this new music marketplace.
The final attempt seemed to be this technology called
DRM. DRM is a digital “lock” that would
be required to go on every piece of music released on the internet. Music with DRM would not be playable except
to customers who had a legal right to use it.
At first, this seemed like a viable solution. But even DRM didn’t stop the flood of lost
revenue through file sharing. And
hackers seemed more than happy to learn to undo any technical locks the music
industry could come up with.
So as we move into the last half of the first decade of this
century, the music industry is learning to work with this new music marketplace
rather than fight it. And by learning
lessons from the Indie labels and how to serve customers in a digital world,
there seems to be a new solution on the way but one that is dictated on the
customer’s terms rather on the terms of the big music labels. Somehow, that seems like it is the way it
should have been all along.