The Future of Music / The Music Industry
Posted: Sat Mar 10, 2007 10:07 am
In the past few years - since the time of Napstar etc - music has been available to download illegally and more recently legally on the internet. With the arrival of video hosting sites such as YouTube etc people are able to post there own music vidoes and gain an international audience on-line, people have even gained record deals via online webcam shows.
So, this brings me to ask...what does the future hold for music, the music industry and musicians as a whole? Please justify your answers and perhaps give your views on why the current situation is like it is.
IMO the music industry overcharges hugely, this is probably the main reason for illegal downloading of music and for that matter DVD's and videos. If the music industry didn't charge so much money for records which cost next to nothing to make then there would be no incentive to download music illegally. This would however annoy many - but not all -musicians.
As video sites like YouTube expand and develop i can quickly see them becoming similar to bit-torrent sites etc. People will stick a track on youtube where it can be watched / downloaded for free and there will be almost nothing that YouTube will be able to do. The music industry threatened in the past to sue people who downloaded music, but they havn't had a great deal of success. Youtube and other sites like it also give small time musicians the chance to get a global audience (for example the 4th most viewed vidoe on Youtube is a guy playing the guitar).
In the future i can see two things happening - the music industry will either reduce its prices reducing the demand for downloading, or they will refuse to do so and will ultimately pay the price...big time!
So, this brings me to ask...what does the future hold for music, the music industry and musicians as a whole? Please justify your answers and perhaps give your views on why the current situation is like it is.
IMO the music industry overcharges hugely, this is probably the main reason for illegal downloading of music and for that matter DVD's and videos. If the music industry didn't charge so much money for records which cost next to nothing to make then there would be no incentive to download music illegally. This would however annoy many - but not all -musicians.
As video sites like YouTube expand and develop i can quickly see them becoming similar to bit-torrent sites etc. People will stick a track on youtube where it can be watched / downloaded for free and there will be almost nothing that YouTube will be able to do. The music industry threatened in the past to sue people who downloaded music, but they havn't had a great deal of success. Youtube and other sites like it also give small time musicians the chance to get a global audience (for example the 4th most viewed vidoe on Youtube is a guy playing the guitar).
In the future i can see two things happening - the music industry will either reduce its prices reducing the demand for downloading, or they will refuse to do so and will ultimately pay the price...big time!