When was the last time you went to a record store and bought a physical album? With the plastic case, the CD and the album sleeve with the lyrics inside?
In today’s Internet-powered world, the album-downloading phenomenon has bled the record stores dry of business over the past decade and contributed to the dramatic restructuring of the entire music industry.
Since 2004, both HMV and Tower Records (two of the biggest music mega-store chains) have totally pulled out of the U.S. market. iTunes, on the other hand, has on average sold over 46 songs per second since April 2003, according to TG Daily.
“It’s just so much more convenient to buy music off of iTunes," said sophomore Nathan Hsieh. "For every ten albums I buy, probably only one is an actual CD.”
This shift in consumer focus from CDs to downloads has had a run-off effect on the record labels to which the musicians are signed. As songwriter John Legend stated on BigThink.com, because the record labels are getting less revenue and have smaller budgets, artists now get less support from the label and have to perform many of the tasks a label used to do itself, such as finding management and booking tours.
Moreover, labels now are spending less money on developing artists, and are focusing most of their attention on acts that are guaranteed to instantly make money, such as Lady Gaga or Jason Derulo. An inevitable consequence of that approach is that most of the music today is focused more on being as commercially successful as possible rather than displaying personal artistic integrity. This is not necessarily the fault of artists—Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber are actually really great singers. In today’s industry, however, they have been used by labels as money-making machines (though I’m sure neither Gaga nor Bieber are complaining).
New musicians who are just now breaking out don’t actually need record labels to release their music—anyone can put their music up on the Internet or on iTunes to be downloaded. Musicians no longer need labels to put their albums in record stores because as it stands today, record stores are close to extinction.
The symbolic coup de grace was the closing of the last Virgin Megastore in North America in 2009, heralding a new age in music—an age where CDs are archaic and album covers become little more than flickering lights in a computer screen.
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