How is digital media changing the music industry?

The music industry has changed drastically in the last twenty years. We went from cassettes, to CD’s, to mp3 device’s, to now streaming. This is due to Product obsolescence within the distribution of music which is the industry forcing us to upgrade to these new means of getting music because the ways in which we received it in the past is no longer available. Your new favorite single from your favorite artist may never come out in a hardcopy form due to the fact that streaming has become the new biggest thing. Your Cd players for your mixed CD’s and mp3 players have become obsolete. While the way in which we receive our music has changed, the working of this music industry itself has also changed. Artist no longer need a big label behind them to release music in order to reach the masses. Social media has brought the world so much closer together and has made things we want and need more obtainable. Stream services like Tidal allow artists to have more control over their music and allow them to keep ownership of their music while still being able to release it on a big platform. In the article “Apple to Pay $3 billion to Buy Beats” by Brian X. Chen, Chen states “The iTunes Store opened in 2003, and it has dominated digital music sales over the last decade. Apple said that it had sold 35 billion songs on iTunes and that iTunes Radio had 40 million listeners.” Apple was ahead of this constantly changing music industry when it introduced ITunes and still continues to do so with its partnering with beats and creating their music streaming service. No one had ever heard of selling music by not only albums but by individual song; Steve Jobs states “Nobody had ever sold a song for 99 cents. Nobody really ever sold a song. And we walked in, and we said, ‘we want to sell songs à la Carte. We want to sell albums, too, but we want to sell songs individually.’ They thought that would be the death of the album.” Luckily they conformed and we see how much money it has made them today.