Since its creation, the music industry has been steadily expanding. Now, it’s one of the biggest and most profitable industries in the world. With the internet on the rise, it is easier than ever to purchase and listen to music. Yet, some believe that the internet is a detrimental factor to the industry itself, and is taking away a lot of its profits. Most of the arguments from this side include piracy and cheaper sales than before. Piracy is the most important of these two arguments, and is much harder to gather information on. However, these arguments can be turned around and used to display how the internet has helped the industry. The music industry is positively affected by the digital age because of increased sales due to ease of access, and a shift towards live performances, and how piracy is a minor issue despite the uproar about it.

Internet marketplaces have made it easier than ever to purchase and listen to music. Manufacturers don’t have to produce as many CDs as they did before, because almost everybody buys their music from iTunes or Google Play. And now, more people are paying for a music streaming service like Spotify to just stream music directly to their phone. Not only this, everything is either streamed or downloaded to your smartphone; Everybody has all their music there. This ease of access has led to a huge jump in users. A survey done by Spotify displayed that their users jumped from forty million in 2016, to fifty million in 2017 (Spotify). In only one year, they increased their subscribers by ten million people. At ten dollars a month, fifty million users translates to five hundred million dollars a month in profits. Even factoring in their expenses, they still make a lot of money. Of that five hundred million dollars, some of that goes to licensing the music that they stream. A percentage of that money goes to the artists that produce the music. Even through Spotify, artists are still being paid. While they do make less money per play than they would from an album purchase, the amount of people that use Spotify make up for that difference. This trend is not just exclusive to Spotify. iTunes and Google Play have also seen growth since they have been active. The major arguments against the use of internet marketplaces is that not enough of the money is going to the artists. It is true that artists do not get much money per sale or per listen; However, mass amounts of music are sold and listened to through these platforms. This balances out the issue, if not over compensating for it. Plus, it is extremely cheap for artists to make music in today’s environment.

Music in the digital age is incredibly easy to produce. Every iPhone and Apple computer currently comes pre-loaded with Garage Band for free. Garage Band is an incredibly powerful recording and editing tool. Audacity is another free recording tool that can be used to create music. The software available for free today is more powerful and far easier to use than multi-million dollar recording studios from twenty years ago (Johnson). Home recording is easier to do now than ever. Just look at Fender. Fender is a company that is most famous for making guitars and guitar amps. Their Mustang series of amps is an entirely digital take on getting guitar sounds, and offers USB recording. You can take a simple USB cable and plug one end into your amp, and the other end into a laptop with GarageBand installed. Then, with a press of the record button, you can play whatever you like and GarageBand will record all of it with the same sound quality as an expensive recording studio. In fact, I own a Fender Mustang amp, and have done this exact thing. Independent bands can also upload their albums or singles onto iTunes for sale.  Apple takes a cut of the profits of course, but there are other sites like Bandcamp where you can publish your own music for free. Or, you can just create your own website and sell it there. There are so many ways to get your music out there on the internet. This has led to a huge boom in bands who perform, record, produce, and even publish their own music. It does take time for songs to start selling, let alone make a profit. This is due to how long it takes for a band’s music to be discovered. This is where websites like SoundCloud come in. On SoundCloud, an artist can upload full songs for free. It is a website full of budding musicians, rappers, dubstep artists, and many more. Many people use SoundCloud to gain a following, and then sell their music on iTunes, or get a streaming share from Spotify. There are more artists than ever in the digital age, and more popularity to be had. More money to be gained.

A lot of an artist’s revenue does not actually come from their album sales. Many artists make their money selling concert tickets and merchandise. According to the article “The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t,” in the year 1999, “the music business took in around $10 billion in live-music revenue internationally; in 2014, live music generated almost $30 billion in live-music revenue internationally” (Johnson). This most likely is due to the amount of people who buy tickets, and due to the increased diversity in the industry, along with a heavily increased price tag. Ticket prices have skyrocketed, as much as one hundred and fifty percent in the time between 1997 and 2012 (Johnson). Prices continue to grow, and will continue to grow as the industry does. Of course, many of the artists making millions of dollars in live revenue are the big acts, the type to sell-out entire stadiums. But, this trend of big artists taking most of the share of revenue has been happening since the beginning of arena concerts in the 1960s and is not the fault of the digital age. One could argue that this shift in the industry towards live shows only benefits the “upper class” of music and is negatively affecting amateur artists who do not have a lot of money to work with. While it is true that they will not be making the kind of money that the live artists have, the shift towards internet sales makes up for this loss by providing the tools necessary for producing your own music, as mentioned earlier (Johnson). Amateur artists can still make money off sales through the internet; They can sell their music without even having to pay a publisher. The internet age gives power to the creator. This is something new to the music industry. Beforehand, it was the publisher that had the power. They had the final say. But now, it’s the artists with the power to do what they want. 

What is probably the most important argument against the internet is the topic of piracy. There are websites almost entirely dedicated to piracy. These sites get tons of traffic, and a lot of data is shared through them. Not only that, but there are other websites that are used for changing YouTube videos into MP3 files for free. In an article titled “What Music Piracy Really Looks Like,” it is shown that most illegally downloaded music is obtained from YouTube. Over seventeen percent of music is downloaded from YouTube (Resnikoff). This means that an official music video can be instantly ripped into a file that you can then just drag and drop onto your phone. This could be a huge issue worth investigating. In a study done by Rightscorp, a copyright enforcement company, it is shown that there has been a steady growth in petabytes of files shared through file sharing websites since 2012, with it being five hundred fifty-five petabytes in 2008. To put that into perspective, one petabyte is equivalent to one million gigabytes of data. This is only North America (Steele). The numbers that Steele puts forth may seem scary, but are they an actual threat to the music industry? While the graph for North America is taking a steady increase, it is apparent that the biggest jump in files shared is between the years 2017 and 2018. This is entirely speculation, as this article was published in 2015. While the increase is there, is seems to slow down from 2008 up until 2014, where the number of files shared is smaller than the year prior. This article was published in July of 2015, which means that the year was just over half over. What if the number of petabytes shared for 2015 was for the first half of the year? Not only does the information not clarify this, but that would make 2015 an enormous outlier for the research, most likely doubling itself over the course of the year, for seemingly no reason (Steele). While the information given about previous years is reliable, the data predicting the future misleads the reader into thinking that file sharing is still an enormous problem that is still on the rise, which is not the case. Likewise, many file sharing websites have been forced to shut down. The most famous case is the once popular website Megaupload.com. The website was shut down by the FBI, and the site’s owner was arrested. Megaupload was responsible for “generating more than $175 million in criminal proceeds and causing more than half a billion dollars in harm to copyright owners” (Coscarelli). Further evidence that piracy is on its way out.

Piracy, while still being a problem, is not affecting the music industry a great deal. Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters and Nirvana talked about the Naptser case with Metallica. He expressed his dislike for the attitude that went into the lawsuit, and that he didn’t want to pay money just to listen to music. He admitted that it is a big problem for new artists trying to make a name for themselves; people who are struggling to put food on the table. But, he also says that for a band that has millions of fans and millions of dollars, it is not right to be complaining about such a small amount of money potentially being stolen from sales (CliffEugene). Expand “Metallica” to the entire music industry, and you get the same effect. The music industry pulls in a ton of money, and the amount of that they lose from piracy is negligible. Napster was eventually shut down due to the Metallica lawsuit, but even after that, piracy continued to grow. Other websites began to show up. Now that the idea was there, it would continue to be a problem. But, is piracy as much of a problem as we may think? Many people say that piracy hurts the artist because it is directly taking money away from them. Ed Sheeran, popular indie artist, would disagree. In an interview with Digital Music News, he stated that illegal file sharing where he gained his popularity. He claims that his popularity came from students in universities around the world sharing and downloading his music, then buying his albums to support him (Sanchez). And now, he is on the world charts for his newest album. Almost twenty years apart, Dave Grohl and Ed Sheeran both had the same idea. Yes, piracy is taking away some money, but the popularity that artists get outweighs it. If an artist is popular, there will always be people who are willing to buy their albums to support them. No one can deny that Ed Sheeran and Dave Grohl are huge musicians, and hearing them almost defend piracy is surprising. But, they are right. Now, piracy is still an issue. While it can make artists like Ed Sheeran popular, it is still taking money from them. Also, not every artist that gets their music stolen off the internet is going to gain that popularity that he has. A bit of luck did go into his growth. But, even the possibility that something like that can happen is enough reason to defend it. If Ed Sheeran had started making music twenty years ago, he would not have gained the same popularity, or at least, not as quickly as he did.

Along with the digital age came a new sensation: YouTube musicians. There are musicians on YouTube who make their living by making videos of tutorials, jam sessions, songs, music videos, and many more. One of the more popular of these YouTube channels is the guitar channel “Rob Chapman.” Rob gained massive popularity by making interesting guitar tutorials and gear reviews. As of now, he has over five hundred and thirty thousand dedicated subscribers on his channel. He also uses this channel to promote his guitar company, Chapman Guitars, and his band, Dorje. His popularity helped his band’s first album top the UK rock charts. In his documentary about Chapman Guitars, Rob expresses that his guitar company has grown to its current popularity because of the internet. His YouTube channel is the main factor in Chapman getting on its feet and selling guitars (Chapman). He is not the only successful guitar channel as well. There is an entire community of people who do something very like Chapman. Many of them also promote their bands on their channel. Many of them also sell T-shirts. You may not think that this is very important, but a lot of channels sell a lot of T-shirts, and make a lot of money from them. Another aspect that is overlooked is sponsorships. Many of these channels get sponsored by certain companies. These companies will pay a lot of money for you to sponsor them, and many channels take these sponsorships. They are all incredibly successful thanks to the internet. This trend is not exclusive to guitar. There are singers, bassists, drummers, you name it. There are all kinds of musicians making videos on the internet, and sharing their talent with other people. This can only happen in the digital age.

The music industry has done nothing but grow in the digital age. From streaming services, to online marketplaces, to file sharing websites, it is easier than ever to download or stream music. In this way, the internet gives power to the consumer, providing easy and cheap ways to find the music they want in a variety of different ways. The internet also gives way to cheap, and even free ways to record and produce music. In the digital age, it is easy to create your own music and self-publish it for anyone to listen to. In this way, the internet gives power to the artist. The digital age has only made things easier for the music industry, and has helped its growth. The use of YouTube to create communities centered around music is an incredibly successful and lucrative business. YouTube videos are free to create and upload, giving even more power to the artist. The digital age has done nothing but give power to the artist.
