Why Digital Music Is Healthy for The Industry
Marketwatch posted a report stating the immense growth of digital music sales this past year.
Initially digital music was faced with harsh criticism, especially when seeing the amount of music downloaded illegally over the internet these days. The industry sees these downloads as lost sales.
That isn’t true. At least not directly: With the advent of digital music, music consumption itself has gone much higher. People who didn’t even have walkmans now have iPods filled with thousands of songs. Thousands. What the digital revolution has shown is that people like music - a lot, but CD prices as we had seen them in the past 15 years were simply very high. Discs cost 20-odd dollars for a handful of songs, where I can get the same music on my iPod for as little as 10$ on iTunes.
So the millions of downloads aren’t “lost sales”, they would’ve never got sold at the prices back then.
Music giants like EMI, Universal or Sony were exercisign huge market power with their prices. The digital world unraveled the true worth of a musical disc.
This has a few positive effects:
- The music industry loses a bit of it’s glam. This is good because there is extreme disparity between a musician who publishes with Sony records on MTV and a musician performing at famous jazz clubs.
- Prices go down to what they should truly be.
- Digital music is convenient, faster, easier, better in many ways (but also inferior in some, I agree).
Basically the digital movement brings with it’s convenience a much larger target market for all musicians. Everyone is now empowered to enjoy more than just a few CDs, and social media allows for great music exploration.
So in retrospect, digital music is the best things that could’ve happened to the industry.
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