Changes In The Music Industry.

Music has come a long way over the years and like most things in today's society, it is because of technology. Once upon a time, music was created by monks, or by African slaves whilst working. Now it's evolved into a business opportunity for big corporate businesses enabling them to create an idol for people like to look up to. How has this happened?

Well jumping forward a few years, the invention of the radio had a massive impact on the music industry and still does today. Some people actually say that the radio can make or breaks an artists career. With thousands of people tuned in to one radio station at once, one play of a track to these listeners can set the artist up for life. Venues, clubs, bars and opera houses still continued to make music but the sheer power of the radio meant that the most obscure bands could make a name for themselves; thus the radio should be credited for the massive array of genres we have today.

At the same time "record labels" started to appear; businesses offering artists money for their music, it was every musicians dream. Before long, the industry was dominated by "the big 6" EMI, CBS, BMG, PolyGram, WEA and MCA. After a few more years of merges and takeovers, it finally became "the big 4". At the same time, artist were setting up their own labels known as "indie" labels so that they could keep all of the royalties and their rights, despite the financial support from a major label.

Come the 21st century, sales of music in every format fell greatly. This was due to the invention of the internet. The internet allowed pirates to leak music and allow other people to download it for free. This meant the artist was getting nothing out of it and the record labels were losing money. However some artists realised that they could actually use this to their advantage. If people could easily download some of their tracks for free off of their website then their popularity would increase. For example "Arctic Monkeys" started by just giving the first few tracks away for free in order to build up a fan base for the release of the album which turned out to be the fastest selling début album of all time. Now days a lot of artists rely on money from live shows and merchandise the majority of the time.

Also now there is even relatively cheap recording hardware and software, allowing artists to release fairy decent sounding tracks from their own bedroom; this means big trouble for recording studios, record producers and audio engineers.

These constant changes in the music industry now allow consumers to find music of any genre and obtain it for next to nothing, or most of the time, nothing at all. However the producers of audio hardware and software are doing very well and this could open up new opportunities in the future.