Chibuzor Chukwu
Professor Andre Belyi
Composition & Rhetoric 1101 E2
15 November 2017
The Effects of Internet and Music Streaming Services on the Music Industry
In the past two decades, the music industry has gone more digital and technologically advanced. Most of the music heard to nowadays is in digital form. Unlike the olden days, music is hardly ever found in the form of disks and cassettes. The internet is a common way of distributing music Streaming services such as Apple Music (2015), Spotify (2008) and Pandora (2000) have been introduced. These streaming services have grown over the years, gaining millions of subscribers. These streaming services enable users to listen to a wide variety of music for very low costs. Streaming services usually allow the user to either listen to stations or “music on shuffle” for free (with advertisements). Apart from the low costs of streaming services, they also allow free trial periods ranging from thirty days (Google Play Music and Amazon Music) to three months (Apple Music and YouTube Music). As shown in the table above, music streaming services have extremely large libraries that consist of millions of songs. This makes listening to music very easy for consumers. Nowadays, many people who listen to music use these streaming services. People hardly even purchase music anymore. It is believed by many that these services have a positive impact to the individuals in the music industry. Digitization in the music industry has its advantages to those in the music industry; however, the disadvantages can be said to be more than its advantages, especially in terms of revenue. The advantages of online streaming cannot be overlooked. Many consumers tend to find music streaming as an easy and cheap method of listening to music. At the MIDEM music conference in France, music industry professional Tom Silverman explained that 97 percent of the word never buys music- not even Adele (Hampp). He identifies the highest range of music streamers to be in the 18-24 age bracket. In an article by Kate Swanson, Kate conducted a survey of 237 responders to find out the range of people who stream music. 61.2 percent of the respondents were between the ages of 18 and 24. 55 percent of these respondents between 18-24 years were found to be using Spotify on a daily or weekly basis. Pandora was the second highest subscription service, with 44 percent of responders using it. When asked by Kate why they had chosen to use streaming services, they cited convenience, quality and cost reduction. It can be thus inferred that consumers prefer to use music streaming services instead of purchasing music. Research has also shown that online music streaming has had “a positive impact to the sales of offline record sales” (Lee). While some may conclude that online streaming has a positive impact to the music industry, I believe otherwise. At the end of my research, I hope to be able to prove that the role of streaming in the music industry is more negative than it is positive. The research should be able to show that the music industry is worse off than when these streaming services did not exist. Many artists have shown discontent towards streaming services because of the low amounts of money earned from these services. Examples of such artists include Grizzly Bear, The Black Keys, Taylor Swift and Galaxie 500. Bob Nanna, lead vocalist and guitarist for the emo/post-hardcore group Braid, said that he preferred that people purchased their music instead of streaming it, as the band gets paid “next to nothing for streams” (Swanson). Since his label, Polyvinyl Record Co., added Braid's 100-plus catalog to Spotify, Nanna claims to have received "less than $5.00" (Swanson). He believes that the service is not supportable for small bands like Braid with just over 13500 Facebook fans. He believes that the service needs to become “more artist-focused” (Swanson). He and bandmates worry that Spotify is more interested in “building a strong, lasting business than supporting artist's careers and the industry”. Other than a slight increase in followers on social media, Braid has seen little benefit from the service. Many other small-scale artists are not content with music streaming services and prefer people buy their music. Another argument against music streaming is that certain music streaming services allow users to listen to music for free (with ads and limited freedom of choice). For example, on the streaming service Spotify, “there are over 140 million users as of June 2017, but only 60 million of these users are paid subscribers” (About: Spotify). Famous artists such as Taylor Swift have complained about this, with Taylor Swift saying, “Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. I hope they don't underestimate themselves or undervalue their art” (Swift). In her article, she was against the streaming service Spotify as many people used its free model. As a result, she removed all her songs from the service for a while. I agree with Taylor for her actions, as I do not think it is fair for people to work hard to make music, only for their efforts to be in vain and not gain enough revenue afterwards. There is also the issue of music piracy. Illegal downloading of digital files is a growing threat to the music industry. It is much easier for people to pirate music on the internet. The International Federation of the Photographic Industry estimates that over 40 billion songs were illegally downloaded in 2008 (IFPI). In 2011, record labels generated 32 % of their global turnover via digital sales channels, a year-on-year growth of 8 %. Despite this positive development, global music industry revenues decreased by 31 % between 2004 and 2010 (IFPI 6). Meanwhile, 29.8 million users shared illegal and free music in Europe’s top five markets in 2009 (IFPI 11). At the same time, only 35 % of members of illegal networks also paid for music (IFPI 16). This piracy reduces revenue, but most importantly, it distorts the music market. Many music pirates are known to use streaming services. With the emergence and popularity of music streaming services, the relationship between music streaming and music piracy can be established. It is estimated that “more than 28 million paying subscribers and many more music streamers had access to 37 billion songs in 2013” (IFPI). Since music streaming is a low-cost alternative to listening to music, it can be said that streaming music has the potential to “reduce music piracy” (Borja). At the same time, these music streamers are young computer users who usually feel at ease downloading music illegally. As a result, there have been many issues of music piracy in recent times.
To identify the culprits involved in music piracy, Karla Borja used a representative survey of 197 college students who were asked about their online shopping habits, frequency of movie and music downloading, usage of streaming services, and the reasons for avoiding music download fees. Karla discovered that, on average, a music pirate is more likely to be young, poor, easily influenced by peers, and overconfident. Most importantly, it was discovered by Karla that college students who use music streaming services are more likely to engage in music piracy. Streaming services are known to have been “gamed” by spammers, superstars and tech giants. Consider the single “Humble” by Kendrick Lamar. The single landed at number one on Billboard’s streaming chart and was at number one for quite a while. As of July 5, 2017, users played the song more than 291 million times on Spotify alone” (Raymond). However, the hit song has been very useful for streaming sites’ parasitic underbelly- the fake artists who release much inferior editions of popular songs regularly, thus filling up libraries of streaming services with utterly trash music which are viewed because viewers are misled. No one would want to listen to King Stitch’s “Sit Down, Be Humble,” but the track has been streamed “more than 300000 times” thanks to Spotify’s broad search results and a clever title designed to confuse those who do not know the song’s real name (Raymond). On streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music which have more than 100 million active daily users, it is not too hard to trick the system of these services, whether for profit or for attention. Tricking these services does not necessarily mean using the art of deception. Some artists trick these services by providing content wanted by the viewers. For example, the Happy Birthday library consists of hundreds of personalized versions of “Happy Birthday” which are streamed so many times, especially during birthday celebrations. The success of this famous gimmick has led many unknown artists to record songs with the title “Happy Birthday” just so that people can listen to their music. Some of these songs do not even have lyrics. As confused as the masses are, many people stream multiple versions of the song before they can finally find one they want. The way famous artists make music is much different nowadays. Take Chris Brown, for example, whose upcoming album “Heartbreak on Full Moon” has 40 different tracks. It is obvious that he does not really have much to say in this album. However, the famous pop star added many irrelevant tracks to boost streaming numbers. This, he hopes, will increase his sales and make the album shoot up charts much faster than expected. (Raymond). Not only Chris Brown does this, as many other artists engage in this. On various streaming services, it is easy to find an album with many songs when only half of them are listened to by viewers. Incessant profits are made by many famous artists this way. From this paper, I can conclude that music streaming services are harmful to the music industry. To reduce the damage done by these services, they need to improve in certain areas. Music streaming services need to become more artist-focused, considering interests of various artists. The payment structure for these services needs to be revised as higher royalties should be paid to artists. I also believe streaming services should eliminate the free model as it does not benefit many artists. Finally, content on music streaming services need to be arranged in such a manner so that important content can be easily found by consumers.
Works Cited
"About: Spotify." July 2017. Spotify. 27 November 2017. <https://press.spotify.com/us/about/>.
Borja, Karla. "The Effect of Music Streaming Services on Music Piracy among College Students." Computers in human behavior (2015): 69-76. Database. <http://linkinghub.elsevier.com.portal.lib.fit.edu/retrieve/pii/S0747563214007067>.
Dorr, Jonathan. "Music as a Service as an Alternative to Music Piracy?: An Empirical Investigation of the Intention to Use Music Streaming Services." Business and Information Systems Engineering; Berkeley (2013): 383-396.
Hampp, Andrew. "MIDEM Panel Explores "$100 Billion Music Business" with Youtube, Spotify, Samsung, Sony Execs." 26 January 2013. Billboard. 29 March 2013.
IFPI. Digital Music Report 2014. London, 2014. Database. 25 November 2017. <https://search-proquest-com.portal.lib.fit.edu/docview/1459530840?pq-origsite=summon&accountid=27313>.
—. IFPI Digital Music Report 2009. London, 2009. Database. <https://search-proquest-com.portal.lib.fit.edu/docview/1459530840?pq-origsite=summon&accountid=27313>.
—. IFPI Digital Music Report 2010. London, 2010. Database. 25 November 2017. <https://search-proquest-com.portal.lib.fit.edu/docview/1459530840?pq-origsite=summon&accountid=27313>.
—. IFPI Digital Music Report 2012. London, 2012. 25 November 2017. <https://search-proquest-com.portal.lib.fit.edu/docview/1459530840?pq-origsite=summon&accountid=27313>.
Lee, Minhyung. "Cannibalizing or Complementing? The Impact of Online Streaming Services on Music Record Sales." Procedia Computer Science (2016): 662-671. Database. <https://doi-org.portal.lib.fit.edu/10.1016/j.procs.2016.07.166>.
Raymond, Adam. "The Streaming Problem: How Spammers, Superstars, and Tech Giants Gamed the Music Industry." 5 July 2017. Vulture. Database. 26 November 2017. < portal.lib.fit.edu/login?url=http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?>.
Swanson, Kate. "A Case Study on Spotify: Exploring Perceptions of the Music Streaming Service." MEIEA Journal (2013): 207-230. Journal . <https://search-proquest-com.portal.lib.fit.edu/docview/1519295625/fulltext/136CA0EACB574A93PQ/1?accountid=27313>.
Swift, Taylor. "For Taylor Swift, the Future of Music Is a Love Story." The Wall Street Journal 7 July 2014. Newspaper. <http://www.wsj.com/articles/for-taylor-swift-the-future-of-music-is-a-love-story-1404763219>.