Napster's influence on the industry

Before Napster came into play in 1999, cassettes, vinyl’s and CDs were the method for listening to music which were not very mobile and not very convenient. In terms of the music industry, these three methods of music playback were replied on greatly to produce a high revenue via sales. When Napster was introduced to the internet it provided a service that nobody could anticipate, that service was peer-to-peer file sharing. As a consequence, it excluded the need for the old fashion taping of the radio with bad quality that you'd share with your friends. It then reduced the need for CDs and vinyl’s because Napster enabled CD quality downloads through their website which was revolutionary to music consumers. Before Napster released their site everyone used physical music playback options. Napster fixed this. They made music much more accessible to people as anyone who could reach their website was able to download and share music amongst other users.

However, this caused an uproar with bands and other artists that were losing out on sales whilst Napster was profiting. Artistes and bands such as Metallica and Dr Dre accused Napster of stealing the music illegally as nobody was paying for it. In addition to this, albums and songs were circulating the internet before the official release date. Lots of the music industry faced the same problem however Metallica and Dr Dre are two examples where action was taken against Napster. Conversely, there was an exception to that when Radiohead's album 'Kid A' was released on Napster before its actual official release date; this caused the sales of the album to rise because people had already heard it and loved it therefore wanted to go out and buy it. As a consequence, this album went straight to number 1 without any actual intentions of this happening from Napster. Furthermore, a band called Dispatch was able to play at Madison Square Gardens which is a huge venue in New York without having a record deal which was unheard of but made possible by Napster raising the public’s awareness and demand of this band completely unintentionally by sharing music online.

In 2001 Napster was shut down after multiple lawsuits claiming they were stealing the music from artistes and bands. During the couple years the site was active they had been benefiting from this newly found concept. Lots of bands were angry but after Napster was shut down it increased the demand of digitally downloaded music and so came along sites such as FrostWire and LimeWire which are also illegal now. After this came, ITunes was invented by Apple which allowed legal online downloads to be transferred to different devices such as a computer which would have been the most commonly used device at this time.

Since ITunes there have been advances in music playback. Recently, music can be streamed through popular sites such as Spotify and Apple music. Artists are still not happy as they do not make as much money from streaming as they would from record sales. Instead they rely on tours and merchandise; which is a growing market as demographics become more invested with their favourite artistes and bands, many of which have their own ideologies that fans follow. Taylor Swift is one example of artiste that is unhappy with streaming sites. She removed her most recent music from Spotify as she was not happy with the money she was getting per stream. Spotify and Apple music are the real money makers in terms of streaming with the free content dragging you in and most times leading to having a membership to get exclusive features you would not get for free. The increase in people using streaming surface is still climbing and it is not just music streaming sites that are seeing this rise; video streaming sites such as YouTube and Vimeo are becoming increasingly popular, especially as a means of listening to music whilst being able to watch the music or lyric video to go along with it.

Napster was the start of a new era for the music industry but it has brought many problems to light, mostly copyright.  Especially with the recent technological advances where people can make their own music from there smartphones, possibly using stolen sections of a song from someone else and possibly achieving global reach using internet sites such as YouTube that can be accessed by anyone, anywhere without the need of a record company which is a major concern companies such as Sony have. Artistes are ahead of their record companies in this instance as they generally are not as bothered with record sales, artistes take different and some extreme measures to adapt and promote new albums with today’s means of consuming it. Eminem is an example of this when he pretended to be in a mental hospital via his twitter account during a rough patch of his life which left fans posing the question, is he actually mental? This in turn helped generate a lot of hype about the album and it became a great success. Artistes are increasingly using celebrity endorsement via social media to promote albums or songs. Justin Bieber recently did this for his album ‘Purpose’ and he got different celebrities to model a board with the number of days until the album’s release which kept fans interested through the whole process. That is what it is all about now, interest.