Music in the Digital Age

Vinyl records gave way to tapes which gave way to compact discs (CD’s) the contents of which can now all be contained digitally on ones computer (Sevits 2009). CD’s became the most used form of storage for music in 1986, but since then the digital age has taken over even further with the introduction of online music available from sites like Apple’s ‘ITunes’ which was introduced in 2003 (Sevits 2009). It was always possible for friends to share CD’s and burn the songs onto their own computers, so that each person didn’t have to buy the original CD, however a much more influential sharing method rocked the music industry in 2000, with the development of Napster (Sevits 2009).Napster was a peer file sharing program over the internet where you could download pretty much any song you wanted for free. This was music sharing on a level never before seen, and it wasn’t long before the music industry was taking steps to shut it down. It was that year that recording sales declined for the very first time. Napster was quickly shut down, however the door has been left open (Sevits 2009).

File sharing is not illegal and thus there are still places to get music online, however it is much less prevalent and more sites are becoming digital retailers of music (Zentner 2006). Obviously with the decline in recording sales, there is a substantial impact on artists and record companies from file sharing, but with modern technology are these people safe from further exploitation? We have the abilities, thanks to modern computers, to upload, download, and send our favourite music very easily, so even thought the music industry has slowed the occurrence of such file sharing it will not disappear (Zentner 2006). People will continue to find ways to cheat the system and pirate music.

With that said, many music lovers are simply switching to the ease of online purchases, and because of the ease and ability to buy only the songs that he or she wants, overall music purchases may increase.
References:

Sevits, M. 2009, Timeline: A History of music media, Media Management Group, viewed 2 June 2009, http://media.www.dailyemerald.com/media/storage/paper859/news/2007/09/17/Pulse/Timeline.A.History.Of.Music.Media-2970538.shtml.

Zentner, A. 2006, ‘Symposium: Piracy and File Sharing: Measuring the Effect of File Sharing on Music Purchases’, The Journal of Law & Economics, vol. 49, no. 63, LexisNexis.