Anyone with half an ear to the ground of the music industry will tell you that the internet has had a dramatic effect on the way music is sold, distributed and promoted. Those on the traditional side of the industry will likely paint this as a disaster, whilst those on the underground will celebrate it as a victory for freedom of expression.
Whichever way you see it, the changes have been profound. The old guard of the record industry specialised in whipping up demand for an album weeks ahead of its release in bricks and mortar record shops, the only place it would be available bar mail order companies. Due to the enormous resources that it would take to manufacture, market and distribute physical discs, relatively few albums ever saw the light of day.
Thanks to digital music distribution, this has all changed. Aside from the opportunities afforded by myspace, Soundcloud et al. (which are often overstated), many professional music distribution companies now offer distribution to mainstream online music stores such as iTunes, Napster and 7 Digital. As these stores will now stock anything due to the near-zero cost of storage space and bandwidth, the distributors will also now distribute anything. Rather than the risky investment that distributing an album used to be, it is now simply a service.
Combine this with the vast opportunities available to musicians for promoting their music using social media and online media such as blogs and ezines and musicians can now effectively bypass the traditional record label structure if they have the knowledge and wherewithal.
The unfortunate consequence is that while legitimate music sales overall are declining, the money going into the music industry is split amongst a far wider set of people, meaning that the sort of budget required to make albums like Dark Side of the Moon is hard to come by, and bands very often don’t get the long-term support from a record label that they need to develop into something special.
On the flip side, the declining cost of music production technology means that the budget spent on classic albums like these are rarely needed and the opportunity to release music on the same level as artists with access to the record label structure surely outweighs the disadvantages in the final analysis.
Selling music online has fundamentally changed the way the music industry works, and for most people, the new paradigm of music distribution can only be seen as a good thing.
