It wasn’t that long ago that if you wanted to listen to the hot new single, you’d heard on the radio you would have to drive to the store and buy the CD, assuming it was out and not simply on the radio as a promotion for the new album. With the birth of the internet, we’ve seen the way we consume music change drastically. Of course, the music industry changed alongside the customers, and nowadays the internet has created a fully living environment online through multiple platforms to both consume and post your own music and share it directly with your listeners. So, let’s see how deeply impacted the world of music was by the internet.
As the internet and music first intersected, many people feared piracy through programs like LimeWire and Napster. The programs allowed people to share music peer to peer and this trend caused many artists to start investing in selling their music online. So, music platforms like iTunes and Google Music started to pop up and become the new and hip storefronts for artists to sell music and make their music more easily available to people who wanted to buy a single song or simply didn’t have access to music stores. At the same time, we saw the birth of platforms like Bandcamp and many other similar platforms that allowed many up-and-coming artists to post their music online and sell it without having to make deals with Apple or Google.
Nowadays most music is consumed either for free on YouTube or Spotify. Of course, Spotify offers a premium subscription that allows listeners to listen to everything they want and download the music to their phones without any limits. Which of course is insanely beneficial when it comes to democratizing music and making it available to more and more listeners all around the world. The drawback for artists is pretty unclear for listeners still. But when it comes to Spotify plays many artists have complained about how little Spotify gives back to them. This leads many people to encourage fans to buy merchandise and albums if they can to support their favorite artists. This is still a wildly discussed subject and we can only expect it to remain topical in the future.
Many artists are also faced with the reality that to get eyes or rather ears on your music you need to learn how to use the internet and surf the trends. There are hacks to get your music on algorithm playlists and many younger artists starting in the TikTok sphere or starting as Twitch streamers have teams who have a great understanding of this. People have learned to utilize search engine optimization to get the most of the visibility they can get online. This is especially difficult as these are not one-time deals and constantly need to be adjusted to the new trends and the updates in the algorithm. Learning to best utilize the TikTok tagging system or the best categories for your music on youtube is a real headache and you should look into hiring a specialist who can direct the most attention toward your work without having you do the heavy lifting.
As you can see the internet has not only drastically changed the way we see music as art but also the way we consume it concretely. There’s also the reality that things have changed even more for artists who are trying to get their music out there and gain visibility through all the many social media platforms that are pretty much required nowadays if you aim to be a public personality or connect with an audience, especially with a younger audience. Whether all these changes are for the better or the worst remains a heavily debated subject but if you love listening to music right now is a great time to be a music listener. We can only hope that all the positive changes we’ve seen for those who enjoy listening to music can eventually be just as positive for those who produce and create it. Through the constant discussion surrounding the subject, we might see these positive change blossom from a constructive exchange of ideas from engineers, fans, and musicians themselves.