Music and Streaming Services

Youssef YAHIAOUI (International student – France)

09/20/2016

Digital media has extremely changed the music industry. If we go back years ago, music was only available via vinyl and then many years after music were available thanks to CDs. At that time the only way to listen music was to buy the album of each artist, so the business model was clearly defined.
Nowadays streaming service has changed everything. Applications allow people to have access to millions of music.
Articles speak about the late arrival of Apple into streaming services. But they bought beats (by Dr Dre) which was the largest acquisition in its history that will help them “play catch-up with rivals that offer subscription-based music services”.
But even today we don’t need anymore to buy the album of each artist but only to have an online access and get music for free because other than applications proposed by spotify or Apple, you have some free applications that allow you to listen songs from different artists and different album, for free.
As we can see in the article 2, this leads to the fact that the work of artists is not well recognized and they are not getting paid fairly that’s why Jay-z has decided to invest $54 million to buy music streaming service Tidal.

With these new streaming services one of the major question is : What will be the business model of artists that write and make songs ?
In the article 2 we have a strong example. Indeed we can read that even avicii and Aloe Blacc’s hit song “Wake Me Up” had more than 168 million streams on Pandora since its release in 2013 but its three songwriters were paid only $12,359.
The problem with streaming services is that if you don’t have any internet access you can’t listen to music anymore and people who still wants to listen without paying will be “forced” to download the songs!
Also, rewards for artists are mainly based on the number of albums sold over the year, but how to be fair towards some artists if people didn’t buy their album but they listened only through streaming services?
So we also have to change the way how artists are rewarded and we might take into account the number of people who listened the music or album through streaming services.
On the other hand it could be an opportunity for young artists who didn’t have the resources to produce their music and to distribute it all over their country or even all over the world, to share their music and be famous.