It’s amazing to think about how the music industry has transformed in my lifetime. I first got into music at around the age of ten. I bought cassette singles from Our Price, was a religious reader of Smash Hits and watched Top of the Pops every week. Thirteen years later none of those things exist, but one thing has not changed at all: The major labels still control the music industry and dominate the charts. Some weeks there will be a few independent artists in the top ten, others there will be none, but this was no different in 1998. Bands like Faithless and The Beautiful South broke through on indie labels before moving into the majors as their success grew, just as we see artists do in 2011.
The internet revolution and the financial downturn we have experienced in the past decade have forced everyone in the music industry to adapt in order to survive. While the majors may have made some big mistakes and shown massive misunderstanding of the music-buying public on several occasions, they continue to be responsible for the majority of the biggest music success stories both in the UK and worldwide. Sometimes they have genuinely found ways to cater to the needs of a new generation of music fans, and sometimes they have used their wealth and influence to bulldoze through the largely un-regulated online world in order to secure their acts’ success. Either way, they’re showing no sign of losing their grip any time soon.
My first attempt to download an MP3 came in early 2000. My dad had informed me you could get music for free online so I requested my favourite song of the moment, Steal My Sunshine by LEN. Unfortunately we could only find it on MP3.com, a site you had to pay to download from, and the thought of paying for a song when you didn’t even get a cassette with pictures and lyrics seemed ridiculous, so I forgot about the idea. It wasn’t until about two years later I discovered a site called Audiogalaxy and my life was complete. I was soon filling my My Music folder with Amy Studt, Sita, Anniq and other artists no-one cared about (I had a taste for the obscure even at fourteen). We had dial-up pay as you go internet, so each song took around twenty minutes to download. Yes kids, twenty minutes!
As the years went by my MP3s came from many different sources, ranging from Soulseek, Limewire and Kazaa to a selection of brilliantly curated MP3 blogs. Remember when MP3 blogs used to be a showcase of the blogger’s favourite underrated tracks, rather than Hulkshare links to the latest big name releases which get deleted after a few hours anyway? Even now, when the majority of music sales are paid downloads, I still find it hard to justify spending the same amount of money on music that doesn’t come with pictures, lyrics or (the best bit for me) credits, or any physical proof of ownership. It’s also difficult to feel morally obliged to pay for downloads when I have thousands of songs I have already broken the law to obtain on my hard-drive. And it took me so much time and effort to accumulate this music library, I’m hardly going to delete it now in order to re-purchase it legally!
As illegal downloading went from being a nerd hobby to a very obvious (yet unmeasurable) trend, panic began to set in within the music industry. The record labels tried to shift responsibility to the internet service providers, who in turn panicked and fined random teenagers, their irrational response unsurprisingly doing nothing to inspire downloaders to pay for their MP3s. Concerned artists, mainstream and indie alike, joined in the fight to stop this runaway train. In Sweden, one of the countries where illegal downloading was (and is) most popular due to an earlier roll-out of high speed broadband, pop stars including Alcazar, E-Type and Amy Diamond signed an open letter to convince the public to return to paying for music. Their argument that they deserved to be paid for their work, and needed to be paid for it in order to continue, was entirely fair, but their hope that they could guilt-trip people into paying for something they knew they could get for free was quite misguided.
In the mid-2000s, it really did feel like the days of artists making money from selling music were over. However, as Apple’s iPod helped MP3 players to become the personal music player of choice, people who hadn’t a clue how to find music for free online wanted MP3s. And what they did know was how to click Store on iTunes, search for the song they wanted and download it for 99p. For these people, who soon became the majority, paying for downloads was the norm and the right thing to do. This doesn’t mean people who know how will stop downloading music for free, but the same went for those who knew how to make copies of cassettes and CDs. Now that we are settling into the internet era, it’s clear that just like home taping didn’t kill music, neither will illegal downloading. And for those like me who find it difficult to part with cash for something we have already obtained thousands of times without paying, there is Spotify!
Come back tomorrow for part two of this discussion, where I will be considering whether the internet has allowed independent artists more chance of success, and revealing the lengths the major labels go to in order to defend their rule.
My programmer is trying to convince me to move to .
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