It is not hard to see the vast change that has happened over the past years with the music industry. I think that the major change in the music industry is just the way the labels today are approaching the game today. Especially in the middle 90's they were selling a lot of records, music was bright and a lot of money was being made. But then the years changed and people began downloading illegally and with this I think the industry was hit hard. So they were slow to adapt and ended up behind, which now taking time to recover from that. In the 90's there were many new types of music, and music videos, it was free and free with access of the artistsand now today its become easy to get what you want.
Artist today tend to go through the way of mainstreaming, meaning large organisations that are part of conglomerate (also known as majors), aim to saturate markets. This means they have high production values. Artist then are under this market that helps produce their music, style and image. Another side to the music industry is by being Independent. This is small organisations operating independently to major labels, like niche genres and specific markets. Artist are therefore working on their own, producing music on their own with no back up help. The aim of the artist traditionally is to be signed to a label to promote their music to the targeted audiences and sell a maximum number of albums, seen as the record labels own the music.
The big 6 is a reference to all the music organisations that owned record labels and were record labels.
- 1970's to the late 90's there were the Big 6
- In the 90's the big 6 no longer existed, now came the Big 5
- But in 2004 the big 4 came around which included: Universal Music Group, Sony, EMI and Warner.
- Today (2012) The big 3 had been decided, Universal wanted to buy EMI (20/09/12). in order for that happen they may have to sell one of their other groups like Pralaphone.
However the problem now is the falling of sales and profit margins, as the sales for albums dropped over £100 million. In 2008 the albums were selling at £428 million, but in 2009 dropped to £366 million, and became even worse in 2010 to £319 million.
Due to the active consumer behaviour that is no longer passive sales are decreasing, the commercialisation of the internet and the new places to buy and download music instantly effects this. Also the radio and advertisement system. MTV and Youtube are concepts used to access and watch videos, as Youtube is a faster and quicker way to get what you want than sit and watch MTV and wait for your music video. The traditional role of a music video is to promote the artists latest song as a single or Album. But today music videos struggle to have the same impact- Youtube enables this.
In the UK there are 67 illegal downloading services, as 3/4 of all downloading is illegal. This shows how much demand music has nowadays, and the continuous fail of sales in the music industry. Other ways to get music is by social networking sites, like Facebook, Twitter, Google+. Artist also have their own sites to distribute their music as well as Fansites (Arcade Fire, Radioheads Honesty Box).
Over all you can see the complete ups and downs the music industry are going through and still going through today.
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