Nolan O'Connor's e-Portfolio

In this essay, I traced the paradigm shift of the music industry over the last two decades and how a few relatively recent developments--mainly file sharing and social media--have completely revolutionized and complicated a once straightforward industry.

 

How the Internet Changed the Music Industry

Introduction

Since the Industrial Revolution, changes in technology have resulted in rapid and unprecedented growth in nearly all realms of human activity. Life in the 21st century vastly differs from a mere 15 years ago, and this massive cultural shift is largely due to technological advancements. This trend, however, brings up an interesting, chicken-or-the-egg question. Is technology the cause of this cultural shift, or is the world’s dynamic culture responsible for these unparalleled increases in technology? Since technological advancements offer a more quantitative set of data, it may be easy to simply state that the former is true and dismiss the question. However, upon taking a closer look, the answer may not be so well defined. Humans bring about technological changes to fit their needs and desires, so a technological advancement could be seen as a reflection of the current culture.

 

Arguably one of the most dramatic cultural shifts that has taken place within the last decade has occurred in the music industry. The invention of the compact disc and the Walkman certainly changed the industry, but not to the same magnitude that the Internet age has altered the entire music culture. Over the last 15 years, both file sharing and social media have brought about the most prolific changes that the industry has ever seen.The record stores that once offered a local hub of music culture have been all but replaced by the Internet as file sharing and social media have completely revolutionized both the music industry and the consumer experience of obtaining music.

 

File Sharing

The year is 1998 and recent college drop-out Shawn Fanning is programming away in a closet of his uncle’s office in southern Massachusetts. Although the closet is cluttered with empty pizza boxes and resembles nothing even close to a professional workspace, Fanning is in the process of completely revolutionizing the music industry in a way that even the CEOs of the nation’s most prestigious record labels could have never fathomed. In this lowly office, Fanning, alongside business partner and fellow programmer Sean Parker, are creating Napster, a file sharing network that introduced the concept of storing music on the computer rather than CD’s or vinyls (Downloaded). Since Napster operated on the idea of people sharing MP3 files with others over the Internet, all music acquired from the app was essentially free. Prior to Napster, people were accustomed to purchasing albums when they wanted music, so the idea of obtaining myriads of songs for free seemed revolutionary.

 

One does not need a profound knowledge of economics to understand that consumers prefer to obtain goods for free rather than pay for them. Because of this concept, Napster provided the largest culture shock that the music industry had ever seen, and this entailed the first ever decrease in global record sales a mere year after the software’s creation (Lamont). The fact that Napster was able to alter an industry as complex and involved as the music industry in roughly one year illustrates the profound effects that file sharing and the Internet had on the entire music culture. The paradigm of paying for music that influenced the music industry prior to Napster was completely redefined. Brandon Barber, who worked for Napster as director of product management from 1999 to 2002, described the music industry before Napster as a “locked paradigm” in terms of how music was “found, sourced, created, distributed, marketed, promoted”. Napster, he said, “created an avenue for consumers to step out of that which was superior in almost every way.” (Downloaded).

 

This “avenue” refers to, in part, the effect that the Internet had on the way that society views music as a commodity. When Napster emerged as an alternative for paying for CD’s ,consumers no longer viewed music as a tangible product that they had to pay for but rather as a digital file that they could effortlessly obtain in a few clicks of a mouse. The intangible qualities of the MP3 file stored on a hard drive certainly lessen the guilt associated with obtaining music illegally via file sharing. According to a study of 16 to 28 year olds that knowingly download music through illegal methods such as file sharing, only 16% of the subjects “considered their actions morally wrong” (Delgado). Although obtaining music through file sharing is essentially stealing from the artists that produce that particular music, consumers evidently seemed to feel entitled to doing so, and this illustrates the profound effect that the Internet and file sharing had on the consumer’s view of music as a commodity.

 

Through a series of lawsuits from high-profile artists and a cracking down on the legality of file sharing, Napster was essentially defunct as a file sharing service as of early 2001 (Lamont). However, many other softwares quickly emerged to satiate people’s newfound desire for free digital music files, and file sharing continues to cause the U.S economy to lose a total of $12.5 billion in annual output (Siwek). The fact that file sharing can affect the entire U.S economy on such a large scale only serves to highlight the profound effects that it has had on the music industry.

 

Social Media

While file sharing affected mainly the consumer experience in terms of finding and obtaining music, the recent evolution of social media has all but revolutionized the way that artists display their music to the public. Prior to the proliferation of social media, artists were typically discovered through live shows or by mailing a demo CD to a record company in hopes of their approval. This paradigm severely limited the quantity of artists that consumers were able to choose from, but that would completely change with the rise of social media in the early 2000’s. Myspace, which was arguably the first widely used and popular social media platform, first offered a unique opportunity for artists of any experience level to gain exposure to Internet users. Artists no longer needed record deals to share their music with the world--they could do so in a matter of minutes and for no cost with a Myspace account.

 

Many musicians of all experience levels saw social media as a lucrative opportunity for either augmenting or starting a fanbase. For example, in 2006, Lily Allen was a 21-year old aspiring musician that had never before played a live show and did not know the difference between a bass and a guitar. However, only a few weeks after posting a few of her tracks to Myspace, she was greeted with a whopping 24,932 friends on her page and a record deal (Sawyer). Although scenarios were not necessarily common and require a tremendous amount of luck, they still demonstrate the enhanced opportunities that social media offered to young and inexperienced musicians.

 

Many artists also cherished the independence that Myspace and other types of social media offered since it directly contrasted the lack of control that artists often faced while signed to a record company. This creative independence allowed artists to gain popularity through different and often bizarre methods. A perfect of example of an unorthodox approach to fame is Lil B, a young rapper from the Berkeley area. After experiencing a fair amount of success with his group, The Pack, Lil B decided to utilize social media to promote his solo career, and this involved creating hundreds of MySpace accounts often under the alias “BasedGod” that would offer free downloads to his mixtapes that he would churn out once every few weeks (Roberts) . Considering the majority of his music borders on absurdity, it’s doubtful that he would ever attract the ears of any record labels. Without social media, however, Lil B may have been forced to adopt a more mainstream-friendly sound in order to achieve the same level of success. Therefore, social media allows the Lil B’s of the world to produce what they would like, and this ultimately serves to diversify the entire music culture.

 

The burgeoning of social media essentially levelled the playing field in terms of the ability of an artist to gain popularity and achieve success in the music industry. Jon Cohen, co-founder of the Fader music label, aptly stated that due to the increasing number of artists and acts that have emerged within the last few years, it becomes “harder and harder to have big mainstream stars” (Evolution of Music Online). With this onslaught of new music that social media has brought about comes an entirely new consumer experience. Since they simply have more options, consumers are more likely to appreciate a diverse array of styles, and with the help of music blogs, they can sift through the vast gamut of selections to find their preferred niche. In order to differentiate themselves from this ever increasing deluge of music, artists must develop a unique and distinguishable style, and this ultimately diversifies the music industry.

 

Conclusion

While other features of the Internet such as Youtube and Internet Radio have contributed to the paradigm shift of the music culture, file sharing and social media have had the most notable effects. File sharing completely altered the way that consumers view music as a commodity and wreaked financial havoc on a large and prominent industry while social media ultimately caused a diversification in the styles of music in the industry. In a matter of 15 years, the Internet completely revolutionized the entire music industry and culture in ways that nobody could have predicted.

 

The question still remains however, which exactly was the cause of this radical change. One might say that the technology that Napster introduced ultimately caused the changes to the music industry, but there’s certainly a counter argument to this. There must have been some force that drove Shawn Fanning to formulate this radical idea of file sharing, and this force may have been that people were simply growing frustrated with spending money every time they wanted the new Foo Fighters album. Likewise, MySpace could have been offered as a platform for young, independent musicians because of musicians’ frustrations with the difficulty of obtaining a record deal. The true answer to this question is certainly muddled and could be interpreted in a variety of ways. Considering the unfathomably rapid evolution of the music culture that has occurred within the last 15 years, it’s difficult to place the sole cause on just the culture or just the technology. Nevertheless, the rise of the Internet has wholly transformed both the music industry and culture into something almost entirely different than it was a mere 15 years ago.

 

Works Cited

Delgado, Ray. "Law Professors Examine Ethical Controversies of Peer-to-peerfile Sharing." Stanford Report. Stanford University, 17 Mar. 2004. Web. 25 Oct. 2013.Downloaded. Dir. Alex Winter. AOL, 2013. Film. AOL. VH1. Web.Evolution of Music Online. Prod. Kornhaber Brown. PBS, 2012. Youtube Video.Lamont, Tom. "Napster: The Day the Music Was Set Free." The Guardian. The Guardian, 23 Feb. 2013. Web. 24 Oct. 2013.Roberts, Steven. "Lil B Is Taking The Net By Storm, One Freestyle At A Time." MTV. MTV, 30 July 2010. Web. 24 Oct. 2013.Sawyer, Miranda. "Pictures of Lily." The Guardian. The Guardian, 20 May 2006. Web. 25 Oct. 2013.Siwek, Stephen E. "The True Cost of Sound Recording Piracy to the U.S. Economy IPI Issues Institute for Policy Innovation." Institute for Policy Innovation. IPI, 21 Aug. 2007. Web. 24 Oct. 2013.