I was going to start with a history of recorded music and how things progressed through different types of formats and onto what we use today...but I'm not a historian and am not qualified to get into those details without doing a lot of research on it. We all know that the media used to carry music have evolved over the years...no news there.
Many people may not know the business model that's existed in the music business for years. The changes we're experiencing now are having major effects on this business model so it's worth a few sentences. To put it in a most basic model, when you buy a CD the money from that purchase is split among all the groups that made it happen. The store gets a cut, the distributor does, the record company gets a BIG cut, and then the songwriters get about 9 cents per song.
In the 1990s the advent of Napster and other file sharing services created easy ways for people to access music without paying for it. This pretty much destroyed the business model for everyone listed above. This is stealing, no two ways about it. I admit that I used Kazaa while it was available and found a LOT of music that I never would have found outside of being able to "demo" pretty much anything in the world. If we're being honest with ourselves we know that a lot of bands were discovered by fans through file sharing and while they weren't compensated for their works, their fan bases grew very quickly, so it wasn't ALL bad.
I think it's a fair analogy to say file sharing was a bit like Noah's flood. The music business was pretty broken anyway, and some parts of the team were grossly overcompensated while others were barely paid for their work. Breaking the music business allowed it to start over again, and led the creators to take charge of their product again, determining for themselves how it would be made, distributed and sold.
Radiohead made major waves a few years ago with their record In Rainbows that they recorded themselves (with their own money), and released digitally and allowed buyers to name their own price. I paid about $5 for it. Radiohead had been getting weird and I didn't want to shell out a lot for something that I may not like. Many artists are now taking Radiohead's idea and doing EVERYTHING themselves. They aren't allowing buyers to pay whatever they want, but they're in control again. Radiohead have admitted they are selling FAR LESS records than they were with major label support, but also that they're making FAR MORE money per record sold than before. It's a win/win for them because they're abandoning a system that benefitted the system more than themselves and now they're in control and can operate how they want to.
Many bands I listen to now aren't signed with major labels, or even with labels at all. They're getting loans or using their own money to record and distributing their music digitally. They're having to ask the question: How do we want to get our product to the public, and what do we expect in return? This article has comments from Trent Reznor regarding his feelings about creating, the value of his creations and being compensated for them. Artists ARE having to tour to survive since the revenue stream from record sales has shrunk. To increase their profits on the road many of them have taken to creating their own merchandise too - DIY is back en force once again.
As consumers we're asking ourselves a question too: How do I want to access music and what do I expect to pay for it? I asked some friends how they get music and the overwhelming answer was iTunes. With this service you're paying around $1 per song and can transfer it to your iPod/iPhone and a limited number of computers. And with iTunes you download songs from the iTunes music store onto your computer's hard drive or your media player.
It goes without saying that CDs are still sold in stores. While your actual "rights" with a CD are supposed to be limited to personal use this is the format that allows the most freedom. You can rip it onto your computer, and unlimited other computers, upload files to sharing sites, email the files, burn onto CDs, and load them onto media players. Some of these things aren't technically within a user's "rights", but most people don't know that and don't care.
Subscription services allow a user to pay a fee and allow certain uses of its media. With Zune I pay $16 per month and download files from Zune Marketplace to my computer's hard drive, and can load the media files on up to three Zune or Windows Phone devices. This is the perfect solution for me as a hardcore audiophile. I'm able to pay what is a VERY reasonable monthly fee and get all the music I want. Frankly, if I had to pay iTunes rates I would have to either curb my appetite or end up spending far too much of my income on music. And don't tell the people at Microsoft, but I'd be willing to pay double per month for my current subscription since I'm getting THAT much value out of it...SSSHHH!
Lastly, you can still steal your music through the few file sharing sites that remain due to loopholes in the legal system that allow their existence. Again, I admit that I did use Kazaa for awhile, but after working in the music industry and seeing how stealing music affects people who create for a living I can't call it anything but theft and piracy. The ONLY time I'll consider searching for a free download is when something is out of print and simply can't be bought anymore. If there's no one to be compensated from a purchase, then no harm no foul, right?...right? Maybe, maybe not. Take a look at this chart to see how creators are compensated when their works are accessed through some of the services we use today.
I think if we look at what's happening digitally we'll see the future of music consumption. Our computers' hard drives are getting bigger and cheaper. I'm noticing that storage capacities on our media players have NOT been increasing to match our computers...and they really can't be expected to. Early generations of Zunes, iPods and other media players used spinning drives, and their capacities did eventually get to be over 200GB, which is a TON of music. If you know anything about hard drives you know that a full hard drive is a slow hard drive...and also that they're fragile. Media players now are using flash storage. It's very durable, accessed faster and has no moving parts, but capacities aren't as big and larger capacities are MUCH more expensive.
So, media player capacities aren't really growing anymore, but our network speeds and bandwidths ARE. I believe we're marching down a road that will lead us to the CLOUD being the norm when it comes to music. Why do we need to store all of these files and take up all this space on our computers, phones and media players when we can access them in the cloud instantly and play them back flawlessly? Well, right now we can't. We're not there yet but we're going there. The future of music consumption will be with various cloud providers actually housing the music files and charging us a fee to access them. Some of these services today are Spotify, Zune Marketplace, iTunes and Google music. They're not perfect yet but we're on our way, and I'm looking forward to it.
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