The Post-Internet Indie Music Industry.
In a confirmatory study, market research done by the NDP Group and published by CE Pro, an online consumer electronics publication, in 2012, Apple was found to own a whopping 64% market share for digital purchases of music, and 29% of market share for music retailers as a whole. As I have discussed in my blog Impact of Digital Sales on The Indie Music Industry, noting this success of Apple, other established companies – Google, Amazon etc. also decided to explore the digital music market, including market for indie music. Other smaller companies followed suit and tried to create a viable business model around digital music, some were successful in sustaining and even growing. Spotify, a Swedish company founded in 2006, with a library as big as iTunes and a subscription model with a desktop application similar to iTunes, effectively differentiate itself by incorporating social features into its online platform. The legal digital distribution of music clearly became the key element looking into the future, with digital sales surpassing physical in value for the first time in 2011.
As discussed in my blog Transformation of the Indie Music Industry, lot of barriers within the production, promotion and distribution system were broken for the indie artists with the introduction of digital formats in recording instead of analog formats in the 1980s. When advancement in technology began to break down the previously rigid infrastructure of the recording industry, the strongly held oligopoly of the industry was shaken and almost eliminated after being predominant for over half a century. Internet brought with it an increasing number of affordable and powerful software that made the production costs of music fall drastically in the 1990s, with new technologies making robust recording equipment available to indie musicians. Today, there continues to be a reduction in the necessity of expensive studio time, enabling indie artists and musicians to take the DIY approach in creating music.
While the entire music industry was undergoing a much awaited transformation, there is no doubt that the landscape of the indie music industry also underwent a significant change since the turn of the millennium. This article is a part of a larger article about the evolution of the indie music industry. You can read more about this in my blog Indie Music Industry. In this series of blogs, I am discussing the change that this millennium brought about in the music industry as well as in the way other industries functioned, due to technological change. The record companies have continually lost control that they once practised in keeping prices for indie and other forms of music, and their profits, high. The fundamental changes in production, distribution and promotion discussed earlier, eventually transformed the redistributed profits, economic climate, and created new business opportunities for indie artists and indie musicians. With easily available and advanced producing and recording software, aspiring indie artists are able to create high-quality music online, from any part of the world.
Indie artists and musicians do not need labels to help them with their initial cost of publishing and recording anymore. Professional studios are no longer required as they used to be in the last century. The record labels drew their power by majorly controlling these two areas. The free and open communication of the internet has led not only to reduction in the power of record labels, but also to reduction in costs associated with distribution and promotion, with the rise of social media. Today, an indie artist is free to create a song, upload to a host website and share it through social media, reaching out to listeners across the world, from the comfort of their home. The emergence of sites like SoundCloud for music and YouTube for videos allow users to easily upload video and audio content for free.
I will follow up with another article about indirect effects of internet on the music industry. If you have been following my previous articles on music copyrights and royalties, by now you should have a good understanding of the fundamentals. It might be wise to re-read those articles, or bookmark them to grab back whenever you encounter a subject that I have written about!
Please share your experiences and I will add them to my future blogs.
