HDASTMI: How we got to this position
In all this talk of what the future holds for the music industry, it is sometimes worth thinking that things weren’t always this complicated. Back at the very start of the decade, there wasn’t so much fear and uncertainty but more a general assurance that the future of the industry was going to be steady. As we approach the end, it’s almost unrecognisable from what it was in 2000. So, in order to remind you of how far we’ve come and to give you a brief but general overview of the last decade, it’s a summary of what’s happened. Obviously, some stuff might be missing but I think this is a decent enough general consensus.
At the start of the decade, most of the talk was about Napster, in its illegal format, and how users were swapping copyright and non-copyright files over it. Despite the fact that it was criticised for breaking copyright laws, it did have an impact on getting albums like Kid A by Radiohead to the top of the Billboard album chart in the USA when it might not have reached so high a position without file-sharing. In the end, after a much-publicised tiff with Metallica, Napster was shut down in 2002 after it went bankrupt. File-sharing still continues to this day on several platforms like torrent sites and freeware programs, which arguably is now near-impossible to stop outright.
In 2004, legal downloads started to pick up steam, helped out considerably by the rise in popularity of the iPod. In the UK, the first download charts started in August 2004, but as it proved even more popular than physical singles, downloads were allowed to contribute to the main singles charts. The trend that continued for the next few months and years was the rise of sales on the Internet and the decline of sales of physical products like CDs and vinyl. This was also a time where retail stores that sold music were beginning to struggle and the number of music shops have now declined considerably.
Then in October 2007, Radiohead gave the industry a kick up the bum in the form of the well-documented way they decided to release In Rainbows (pay what you want or a boxset of goodies costing £40). After this release, a lot of other artists tried to give their fans more value for money by going down the boxsets/tiered pricing option. Another trend to emerge was the free download taster – bands giving away free downloads at the start of their album promo trail to give fans a taster of what was to come. It was also at this time where single sales hit an all-time low.
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Posted on October 6th, 2009 by Max
Filed under: How Do Artists Survive The Music Industry?
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