The internet has unarguably made a huge impact on the way we live our lives. Barely a day goes by when we don’t use our phones for streaming videos and music, staying in contact in friends or shopping online. In fact, for my generation, it can be hard to imagine there was ever a time without it. Nevertheless, it wasn’t that long ago when music was bought from record stores and not streamed on Spotify, when gigs were advertised with posters not Instagram videos… Have things improved or does the internet just make music less genuine and lose artists revenue?
Much to the annoyance of older generations, the way we listen to music is constantly changing. From records to cassettes to CDs to MP3s and now to streaming services, the music industry has had to constantly evolve and maybe hasn’t quite caught up. The first issue that cropped up was illegal music sharing sites like Napster and Limeware which lost artists and record labels money and couldn’t be easily policed. Although cheap music download sites like iTunes and Amazon temporarily solved this, the emergence of the streaming service quickly caused another conundrum for the music industry to solve.
The average artist used to earn from $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream. This value has since increased but, as this money needs to be shared out between every single person involved in creating that track, musicians still need around 400,000 streams to even make the US minimum wage. With fewer and fewer people buying CDs and more and more record stores closing, artists are making less and less money. This means that it is harder for artists to enter the industry, especially artists composing music from more niche genres.
However, there are some up-sides to the internet for those trying to enter the industry. Artists no longer must rely on record labels and radio plays to get their music heard as they can easily publish videos and audio files to streaming services and social media sites. Managers are no longer needed with plenty of tutorials on creating demos and designing your image found all over the internet. Even if an artist isn’t immediately discovered, they can still make a living as their revenue isn’t divided amongst a group of people. One downside of this, however, is that it does make music appear less of a career, scaring musicians who would like some stability away from the industry.
One of the biggest impacts of the internet age on music is the huge archive of music that listeners now have access to, enabling music lovers to experience all kinds of different genres without paying extra for music that they don’t know they’ll like. This does not just apply to listeners but to musicians as well. Lots of talented artists are emerging who have fallen in love with a whole array of different genres and able to fuse them beautifully, creating new and innovative styles of music. However, it could also be said that people are less likely to choose different genres of music, as they can pick exactly what they want, unlike on a radio station, for example. For the same reason, people have stopped playing entire albums and are choosing specific songs.
Unfortunately, streaming services have also had a negative impact on the creation of experimental music. Although auto-generated playlists do aid listeners in the discovery of new music, they also encourage artists to be less inventive in order to see their songs being added. Spotify revealed that almost a third of the music streamed on Spotify was using these playlists and the algorithms that create them favour music that is appreciated by a broad range of fans rather than anything daring or unusual. Similarly, auto-play on YouTube Music seems to play repeats of your most frequently listened songs rather than introducing you to new musicians.
As with everything when it comes to the internet, there are so many horror stories that it can be difficult to disentangle the bad things from the good. The internet could be a great place for music; for discovering it, for sharing it and for inspiring others. The real problem is the companies that run streaming services care little for the livelihood of musicians and for the future of music but rather the profits they could make. Their greed has built a barrier between us and the next step in musical innovation… one that needs to be knocked down.
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