Trends in Record Sales of Indie Music.
The value of record sales for indie music commenced a steep fall at the turn of the century that they are yet to recover from. Early on, the RIAA took legal action seeing Napster and illegal piracy as the culprit, and they certainly had a valid case. However, as discussed in my blog Effect of Piracy on The Indie Music Industry, RIAA’s success in shutting down Napster did not stop countless other sites from utilizing the new technology. Initially, it was relatively easy to legally quell and trace the file sharing piracy methods, however, when an undergraduate student at Northeastern University, Shawn Fanning, launched Napster, it made tracing piracy difficult because the system hosted files from millions of individuals and did not store music on its server. After Napster shut operations in June 2002, after losing the copyright infringement suit by RIAA, other sites started using its technology, after removing the main legal vulnerability that hurt Napster, by working on decentralized servers in peer-to-peer file sharing.
A viable legal digital distribution model was introduced to the industry in 2003, and to the data in 2004, with the unveiling of Apple’s iTunes music store. Digital sales surpassed physical in terms of units sold by 2006 and in value by 2011, gaining dominance at a rate even more rapid than that of CDs. However, the rise in the prevalence of the Internet initially had the opposite impact. Between 2000 and 2011 record sales fell by over 60 percent in value. From 2000 to 2003 units sold dropped by over 25 percent, but have since rapidly increased to their highest level since 1973. As will later be discussed, this is misleading as the growth in units sold actually reflects the re-emergence of the single indie song purchase. While the decline in units sold was reversed after 2003, the value of record shipments continued on a steady decline with the exception of a slight boost in 2004. In my future blogs I will explore the relationship between the rise in high-speed Internet availability and movements in indie music record sales, in terms of both value and units separated by technological (i.e. digital vs. physical) and artistic format (i.e. single vs. album).
The first dozen years of the 21st century have seen an enormous amount of technological change. As discussed in my blog Digital Sales of Indie Music, the new strategies for marketing, promotion and advertising offered by the internet, allow indie artists and bands to connect directly with their fans and easily distribute their work to a highly expanded audience. One such interesting approach to advertising is to release free music as a means to market your live performances. Social media giants Facebook and Twitter that serve as a useful tool for hopeful musicians to connect with fans, enable users to create the opportunity to develop buzz around a new artist by having a song or video spread virally their enormous network. The rise in the use of Internet was a movement counter to that of record sales for indie music. Both access to the Internet and high-speed connections, represented by broadband penetration, have seen a steady increase since the start of the millennium. Several studies have utilized broadband, and Internet penetration as proxies for illegal file-sharing. In the years from 2000-2003, this assumption may hold valid. Since legal digital distribution had not yet been widely successful, consumers, with relation to music, could really only access and download songs illegally online. Thus, the trends in the rise of the prevalence of Internet and broadband connections could be considered representative of Napster’s inception and the growth of music piracy from 2000-2003. It is important to note, though, that the widespread use of the Internet also birthed other phenomena such as social media and online communities, which would play a large role in the music industry as the 21st century continued.
In my next blog I am going to write more about the impact of internet on indie music business as a whole. Please share your experiences and I will add them to my future blogs.
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