The Metamorphosis: A New Way to Consume Music

In these times, it would be impossible to examine the music industry in an intelligent way without looking extensively at how it is being affected by digitalization, an issue that I myself have brought up several times already within various blog postings. The way in which the music business works is shifting entirely to a different format and, whether we like it or not, the change is completely inevitable at this point. The good news is that finally, almost ten years after the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) brought a lawsuit against Napster for copyright infringement; it appears as though the major corporations are attempting to work with the transition rather than fighting against it. This does not mean, of course, that other forms of musical consumption will be disappearing anytime soon. In their article, "Pathways to Music Exploration in a Digital Age," Eszter Hargittai, associate professor in the department of communication studies at Northwestern University, and Steven Tepper, assistant professor in the department of sociology at Vanderbilt, make the point that "despite the increasing availability of digital media, people will be slow to take hold and cultural consumers will continue to rely on traditional mass media as important sources for the discovery of new music." The fact still remains, however, that the way in which we consume music is changing drastically, and I would like to explore how this may be occurring as we move further into the digital age.

First of all, one must consider the vast quantity of music that digitalization makes possible. Hargittai and Tepper write, "Digital storefronts like iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, and MusicMatch offer upwards of three million tracks-the equivalent of about 300,000 CDs." Yet, even with this surplus of available songs, services such as these are not doing well. Paul Resnikoff, the founder and publisher of Digital Music News, reports in one of his posts, "The Power of Context: Can Music Stand On Its Own?" that "The iTunes Store has sold more than five billion downloads since 2003, but the real money for Apple has always been in hardware. Meanwhile, almost every other online store has been marginalized and punished with weak volume." The problem is, once again, illegal music downloading; not many people are actually using these service due to the ease in which they can acquire the same songs for free. Illegal or not, however, the general population is now consuming their music from sources in which there are a dizzying number of options to choose from, and in response bands must change the way in which they market themselves. For one thing, I believe that this new format could point in a positive direction as far as live shows and festivals are concerned. In an industry where record labels are becoming less important and there is such a massive amount of music readily available to choose from on the internet, it is increasingly necessary for a new band to "get their name out there" on their own since there is a greater chance that a corporation will not be able to do it for them. So, if bands want to stand out as acts that people want to download it would be in their best interest to perform whenever possible to create a fan-base.

One way that consumers may respond to the digitalization of music is by focusing more on the context through which the products are presented to them and less on the content of the songs themselves. A good example of what I mean by this is the way in which people pay for ringtones. As Resnikoff says, "A ringtone is worth money because it expresses who you are.... An MP3 is worth nothing because it's a static piece of content." In other words, the music industry needs to discover ways of presenting their products to online users in interesting ways that cause them to want to pay for their music as it helps them to form an identity. As more young people are spending vast amounts of time interacting with one another on the internet, people like Eric Wahlforss, co-founder of SoundCloud, a new music sharing and distributing platform, claim, "That social networks are turning into... modern radio channels... where young people tune into... the context that's in there. They are not just listening to the music isolated in itself." So, it becomes more about the presentation of the product that entices the buyer to spend their money. Although, so far, the digitalization of music has not even come close to repairing the enormous fiscal damage done by the ravaging of the CD's importance, it is interesting to see, first hand, a way that "new inventions in the way sounds, images and texts are produced and captured have changed the way that artists and writers work, leading to new styles... and forms... of expression" (Hargittai and Tepper). Not only has the new medium, through which musicians must work now, changed the way that they produce their material, it has affected the way in which listeners find, access, and relate to it as well.