How The Internet has Affected the Music Industry Essay

When Tim-Berners Lee dreamt up the, then, macabre idea, of an inter-global nedeucerk, Im sure precise few people had the same optimism in believing that it could happen in the future. everyplace the last ten years, the network has evolved from honest web pages to e-mail, to online gaming, to viewing sport and take on previews, and to buying and batchloading unison online. The profit has forthwith become one of the symphony exertions greatest markets, estimated to reach everywhere 25% of sales in pentad years. This may be true, yet the profits is also one of the euphony industries greatest enemies.For some years flat online shop has been functional to anyone with a credit table and an lucre connection. E-commerce retailers much(prenominal) as Amazon.com swap everything from garden tools, to C.Ds and mini-discs. It is besides in the last couple years however, that online induce has taken off. Before this the public and businesses kindred had not been taking ful l returns of this phenomenal asset, which has been proven to save companies millions. It was only with the creation of Windows 98 and other meshwork programs that people were sure that their credit tantalise numbers and personal details could not be viewed by another person, or hacked. Once this huge hurdle was overcome, the track we used the Internet and the effect it had on the practice of medicine pains had changed forever.The close affinity between the Internet and the music industry has led to many dramatic revolutions. offset printing of on the whole it has changed the way in which we purchase music. It has also opened up a new medium for record companies and musicians to conjure their music, and now consumers can beware to music via technology such as RealAudio. Also, with peoples Internet connections pushting faster totally the time, and now with the invention broad reverberate Internet, you can take heed to music through Internet intercommunicate Stations w hilst still surfing the Internet, a new technique called streaming.From a consumers point of view this is all startle-class news, and I am sure there is yet more to come. But from the music industrys perspective, not all of this new technology is helping their cause. some(prenominal) areas of the musicindustry have been put oned in a bad way, areas such as musicians and record companies worry around procures, poesywriters and music publishers also worry roughly procures, and distri hardlyors and high street retailers worry well-nigh sales, and they should be worried as C.D shipments went down by 7% in the first six months of 2002. Copyrights are based on control of the market how and when a procure work is used. So the Internet has changed the foundations of the music industry.Because it is so easy and inexpensive to constitute a website, this makes it easy to put psyches secureed work on to your website and the Internet, therefore making it available for anyone to l isten to or copy. As many consumers give still download this copyrighted music for free it is obvious that they do not believe that copyrights stand for much. This is all quality of a much larger problem, despotic the distribution of copyrighted music on the Internet, a task that surely is closelipped impossible with so many websites committing copyright fraud.The most famous example of copyright fraud occurred on June 1, 1999. With Microsofts ultimate dominance over the computing industry and the Internet, not many other companies get a look in. In the nullify it took a first year university educatee called Shawn Fanning with the help of funding from his uncle to disrupt the proportionality of power. It was with the creation of an MP3 website called Napster that the public really took to downloading music from the Internet. Up until the formation of Napster, the technology had been available but had not really make it into the mainstream. You might say that it was Napster t hat revolutionised the way we obtain music from the Internet, not the new technology. there was however, one fatal flaw with this website. whole the music that was being shared, had copyright to its name, and Napster was utilise these songs without paying the record companies. So on December 7, 1999, The Recording application Association of America sued Napster for copyright infringement. They were asking for damages of $100,000 each time a song was copied. This however did not law of closure Napster operating as normal, it was only when they were sued by the hugely popular rock band Metallica that Napster was prompted to take action, or at least look like they were taking action. It was on October 31, 2000 that Napster announced a new confederacy withBertelsmann-RCA in which Bertelsmann put 26,000,000 into Napster to keep it going. accordingly on July 26, 2001 a federal hazard ordered to shut down Napster, but the music industrys nimbleness did not last long, just two days later it was up and caterpillar track again.Now Napster is working together with study record companies EMI, Sony Music Entertainment and frequent to develop a system where consumers using the service will pay per song or a monthly subscription fee. This is a new system, which will attempt to get everyone.So despite the early indications that all this technology would go to waste, Microsoft, the record companies and Internet companies seem to have sorted themselves out. The Internet may have once been a huge enemy for the music industry, but it seems like the Internet is now on its way to having an extremely positive affect on the music industry.