Music is an immense part of each and every person's life. No matter what it is, everyone needs and enjoys the sounds of music. It can bring a person to tears to remind them of the happiest moment's in their lives. From quirky alternative bands to the old faithfuls, we can gain something from everything we hear, but what if everything that you know and love about music changed forever? That is what is happening before our very eyes. The way artists are having to break onto the music scene is not how it used to be. The music executives of the top three, or "The Big Three", record labels are only in it for a profit and most no longer care about the quality of the product that they produce. Over and over again they produce cookie cutter songs sung by the who's who of today and it automatically becomes a number one hit. Nothing is original anymore. Most songs that are played are the same variations of the same song you have heard five hundred times on most of the radio stations. With the current technology, music executives are able to have information that has never been obtainable before. The music industry that we have grown to love and adore is being ruined by Top 40 radio, music executives, and online streaming.

One Direction is killing the music industry. Okay, maybe not just One Direction, but everything that encompasses them is killing the music industry. The music industry is a complex machine with many working parts. From marketing to their social media presence, every thing that they, and every band like them is doing is slowly killing the music industry that we know and love. Throughout this paper, One Direction will be the band that is getting the most flack, but that is because they are so easy to pick on. One Direction started in 2010 because they were contestants on a popular United Kingdom television show called The X Factor. During their time on The X Factor, they shot to stardom based on their dashing good looks and their fame only rose from there in spite of their third place finish. Ever since then their popularity has grown immensely. They grew from a teeny bopper boy band into international sex symbols while making millions in the process. So much so, that they have inadvertently created "fandoms" or spaces where fans can write fan factions or create "ships" to make themselves feel closer to the band. While all of this seems like no big deal, this is actually detrimental for the music industry itself. One Direction is profiting off of this two fold, but the rest of the industry is suffering. Boy bands have created a culture of "sex sells". If you look at One Direction, every single one of those boys is drop dead gorgeous, but are they really all that talented? No. They are a part of the cookie cutter Top 40 machine. They do not write their own music, they are told how to sing it, and they do not play any of their own instruments. This idea of sex sells is making breaking into the industry a lot harder for the non Top-40 infused artists. The huge tween market that it dominates is where a lot of the money is. According to Duffett, "between screams, twelve-year-olds wearing too much makeup offer hundreds of dollars for backstage passes. [ ...  and] mothers approach the group's security crew, offering to trade sexual favors for the opportunity to get their kids closer to the [band]" (192). The fact that people will go this far to meet an artist is crazy. Music is meant to be enjoyed and not made to be these gods among men. These boy bands are just a small part of the problem surrounding the Top 40 radio. Gone are the days when a musical hopeful could produce their hottest mix tape and take it to the local radio station in hopes of hearing their songs playing through their speakers. These have all been replaced by the same ten artists that you hear over and over on the radio. If you look at the Billboard Hot 100 charts from 2015 only 27 new artists appeared from the 2014 list. That means that 73 of the artists were still producing hit after hit from the previous list to appear on the new chart. (New) As Mark Pollock said, "Even in the Spotify era, the "10 best-selling songs command 82% more of the market than they did a decade ago." That's right: The famous are getting more famous. And soon we might not have much else in our musical culture beyond Taylor Swift. (Pollock)" It is so sad that so many great, not as well known artists are having to be shielded from the spotlight simply because they do not have the "sex sells" aura about them. The Top 40 charts produce the same cookie cutter music over and over again. 

The big music executives are starting to realize that they no longer have to actively seek out new talent, new talent is coming to them, but not in the way that it used to. In the old days you could drop off your CD and hope that a music executive would listen to it and hopefully give you your big break, but today, they times have changed. Social media has played a huge role in who the music executives will look at. They now have data to back up what they audiences would want. Before they worry about if a band or artist will be successful, they can look at their social media to see how many built in fans they would be bringing with them. This is a new technology due to social media. Before, a new deal with a band or artist was a guessing game. They could possibly take a loss on the new band and it would be on them completely. Take Justin Bieber for example. He was a nobody from Canada. He played on street corners and mostly did it for fun. Around age 13, he began posting his singing videos to YouTube and starting gaining views and momentum. Seemingly overnight he became one of the biggest pop starts of our generation. Music executives saw the response that his videos consistently got and began to take notice to how many fans he could bring with him. Music is just more expensive to make and produce these days. It is more complicated than just handing a demo to a radio DJ. They do not have the resources to waste money on bands that will not last. They have to minimize the risk. The large music labels already expect the talent to have a loyal following that is able to keep growing. They have been picking up artists that were on television or "an even better way of reducing risk is to bet on acts and albums that have already hit the jackpot" (New). Music executives have also started releasing greatest hits albums as a way to sell more CDs. If the songs have already sold well once, they assume that they will sell well again. This is similar to band reunion tours. Assuming that the band was still well liked when they broke up, their reunion should generate a profit that will significantly increase their bank accounts. This is also where the "sex sells" comes into play. The band may not be as attractive as they used to be, thus the tickets may not sell as well as they once did. Even if the reunion does not happen, sometimes one of the band members will disband from the group and try a solo career. This has worked for many artists over the years. Michael Jackson was in the Jackson 5 and now he is called the King of Pop, Justin Timberlake was in NSYNC, Nick Jonas was in the Jonas Brothers, Zayn was in One Direction the list goes on and on. This is a way for the artists to rebrand themselves and possibly gain fans that originally would not have been in their demographic before. Take Nick Jonas for instance. The Jonas Brothers was a band that mainly focused on the teenage girl age range. They were on Disney Channel and worked very closely with them. When they broke up in 2013, Nick Jonas took a few years off and in 2015 he released two songs that would both end up on the Billboard Hot 100 for 2015. After those two songs were released he gained a whole new range of fans. Instead of having hoards of preteen and teenage girls squealing with excitement, he now added guys and an older age range to the mix. Jonas also embraced the LGBTQ+ community which also helped to further his career. All of these things combined allowed him to be "interesting to new markets in addition to allowing former, now grown-up, fans, a guilt-free re-connection. (Lobert)"

Streaming, although it is a recent invention, has quickly become one of the biggest problems that the music industry is facing. The Economist says that "Overall recorded-music sales have dropped by 33% in Britain and by 50% in America since 2001" (New). This is largely due to the accessibly of the content online. Sites like Pandora and Spotify are great for the listeners. They get unlimited music at their fingertips at any time, but it comes at a price. These artists make cents on the dollar for this type of listening. It takes thousands of listens on Spotify to make the artists as little as one dollar. This makes it increasingly more difficult for the artist to go on tour, to get recognition, or to simply make a living off of their passion. Brian McTear spoke at a Ted Talk in Philadelphia about the downloading and piracy in the music industry and how it affects him personally. He is an owner of a small record company, making him a prime candidate for feeling the effects of streaming. In his Ted Talk he told a story about a project that his team came up with. They invited a few bands to come to their studio and record a song and distribute it within two days. It was an invitation for the band to learn and they hoped that the consumers would appreciate the story behind the music and return to purchasing it, but it never took off. This was in part, due to the fact that they actually had to purchase the music (YouTube). Streaming is strictly for the consumer. It is a good way for smaller bands to gain a fan based, but it is a terrible way to make money. Adele and Taylor have refused to put their music on Spotify due to this very reason. And even though they did not have that push, they had the number one and number six best selling albums of 2015 respectively. (Two Economics professors showed this by mathematically calculating that "[a] one percent increase in the internet penetration rate led to more than a one percent decrease in record sales. Thus, digital technology, more specifically, digital piracy, has had a negative effect on record sales. Even after 2003, when legal downloads gained mainstream acceptance or 2005. For that matter, when these sales were accounted for in record sales), there was still a negative correlation between internet penetration and music sales. (Bender, 165)" Not everyone feels this way about the use of streaming services though. Kyle Anderson, a writer for Entertainment Weekly, wrote an article about the positive effects of streaming. He argues that music executives believed that if free music were offered, that no one would ever buy an album again. He has found that when a few well known artists released their new albums a week before their official drop that they all had a first week sales bump compared to their previous albums. (Anderson) This might be true, but this does not stop the few that would only listen to the album by the means of Spotify and Pandora. How are they to know that they could have had an even larger bump if they had not released the music ahead of time. Streaming is making it harder and harder for the smaller artists to be able to make money off of their album sales. They are having to rely on touring and merchandise sales to make up the difference that the album sales took away, but the money made off the streaming is most likely not enough to cover the cost of the tour. This is an infinite loop of money problems all due to streaming. 

This is an ever evolving problem that will need an ever evolving solution. For right now, we need to focus on helping the little artists. Taylor Swift, One Direction, and Katy Perry get enough of our time and energy. It is time we give some new talent a try. I am not saying that we completely need to forget about the Top 40 industry, but we definitely need to stray away from it. Most radio stations will be playing this type of music. It is rare to find one that will play up and comings. The only one that I knew of was on Sirius XM and it was replaced with a Top 40 radio station. The streaming service's problems can only be helped by increasing royalties to the artists. It is ridiculous that an artist can only get $167 per one million streams of their song. (Tod) Music executives are always going to be in it for the money. They are human and I understand that, but what I do not understand is that they are willing to completely change and put a stop to the evolutionary flow that the music industry goes through. To fix this problem we will have to either add some more record labels to break up the Big Three in the music industry, but because they own 70% of the record labels in the United States, it would be hard to over come them.  

These are all just the current problems, as soon as a solution will come out for these problems, a new set of issues will have arisen. Just like the Emerging market landscapes mean new challenges for the music industry. What the industry must do is turn these challenges into opportunities. Consumers are changing what they want from and how they experience music. Change is difficult and brings uncertainty. But the good news for the music industry is that consumers have not abandoned music. In fact, they have embraced music and made it a greater part of their daily experience. The product is not the same; the way the product is experienced is not the same. (Bhattacharjee)" The Top 40, boy bands, and streaming have shown just how difficult it actually is for new artists to emerge onto the scene and help our music tastes evolve. 

