Digital music distribution – The changing face of music industry

How selling music online is revolutionizing the traditional methods

From standing in long lines to buy a physical record or a CD from our favorite artists to find the music online upon its arrival with a few clicks from our homes, digital music has drastically improved our music consumption methods.

In its early phase, digitization of music distribution introduced strategic hurdles along with deteriorating revenues to the music industry. However, with growth in innovation, digital distribution became responsible for global music revenues to be higher than before.

But at the same time, the trend brought in new opportunities for a larger population of artists. By curbing down the search costs, digitization of music simplified the discovery of new albums as well as artists. This transformation has the potential to restyle the music that people listen as much as it motivates the artist to innovate his music creation.

The trend is not a thing that has been there for quite a while, as it is a relatively modern concept. Digital music distribution was coined over two decades ago with the rising popularity of unlicensed sharing of music files. Downloading music was started to be seen as a skillful method of sharing music with friends. This led to the emergence of several file sharing communities across the internet and these were used as a medium of uploading songs, giving the downloading access to peers to music of their choice.

The rise of internet usage across the globe, accompanied with the prime benefit of unrestricted access, is now being seen as an open platform by artists to share their work with a greater audience, in the race of becoming popular and gathering a fan base without having to go through additional costs of creating physical records and CDs that eventually have a high risk of ending up as e-waste, and as an artist you would definitely not want that to happen.

When the concept of digital music distribution was relatively new, a lot of malpractices, especially online piracy came into play at a high scale. This directly hampered the revenue arising out of the music industry. Key players and major record labels tried very hard curb the practices of online piracy, however, lack of innovation and technological setups to provide for an equally viable and a legitimate system that distributed music digitally.

Record labels had a few attempts at the time but all went in vain. In the process of doing so, the first company that succeeded in the creation of a digital and completely legitimate service of sales and distribution of music was Apple. In 2003, the technology giant – Apple was able to persuade leading record labels that the audience would buy their music lawfully if they were offered a single simplified platform that permitted the users to download music at really low costs. This service, proposed by Apple in 2003, became a huge success and marked a revolutionary step in the digital music distribution world. It was the iTunes Music Store.

Digital music age has not only benefitted the consumers, it has proved immensely fruitful for the artists as well. Prior to the digital music age, recording studios were equipped with expensive equipment, which could only be handled by expert producers and engineers, but now artists can rent out these studios that are mostly digitally equipped, getting the same quality of music at lower costs. Hence, it is safe to say that digital music distribution has been beneficial for the industry overall, creating a fair space for artists and their fans.