Feature: The Internet Decade > <

Mon, Dec 21 2009

The Music Industry's New Forms Of Communication

Feature: The Internet Decade

Since the year 2000 - or "the Willenium", to use Rivmixx's preferred term - there have been frankly jaw-dropping advances in technology and many of these have had an equally massive impact on the music industry and the way it operates. At the beginning of the decade you needed a recording studio to lay down your tracks, now you need a phone. Where once you had to gig endlessly and work day-jobs to raise the funds to put together a demo, you can now record, distribute and sell your music for about £200 all-in (and that's a generous estimate!).

Over the course of this round-up we'll be picking some of our top innovations from the last ten years, but one thing you'll notice about all of our choices - and this has been in no way engineered - is that they all show an emergence and development of new forms of communication. Whether it's P2P file sharing online or micro-blogging, it's all had knock-on effects in the industry and it's all resulted in a heavier reliance on technology than ever before.

blog

Blogs: Throughout The Naughties

If you think about it, the blogging phenomenon seemed to appear gradually. Many wannabe writers (this one included) had their own websites and various adventurous individuals had created websites about their families, pets, favourite cleaning products etc. They just mainly consisted of flaming skull GIFs, terrible site templates and URLs longer than your arm.

However, the term "blog" and it's various derivatives (blogging, the blogosphere, blogroll) suddenly popped up, probably as a result of the need for newspapers to have an easy description for the place they were suddenly sourcing all their stories from.

This had its own impacts within music circles. Suddenly, the area of the net that used to be the preserve of only the most dedicated fanzine editors was flooded with a wealth of fresh, fast and interesting opinion. Thanks to the tribe-like nature of the blogosphere if a band got talked up by one blog, it would often be championed by the other blogs in that circle and the viral promotion would continue.

Blogs are now an integral part of promoting new bands and getting great music out there. Of course, as with any flood, when the waters receded it left its fair share of detritus, meaning that for every Too Cool To Die that was created there was also a Paris Hilton born.

Of course, nowadays it's all Twitter this and tweeting that and the micro-blogger has taken the best of the blogging world and combined it with the interactivity of social networking, meaning that, frankly, everyone who is anyone tweets. Although, it's still mainly about their families, pets and favourite cleaning products etc.

Did you know... Justin Hall is thought to have been one of the first bloggers. He kept a blog-style online diary, Justin's Links From The Underground, from 1994 onwards. He is now a successful freelance journalist and has been featured in Rolling Stone magazine.

napster

Napster & P2P File Sharing Online: 2000

When Bostonian college student, Napster founder Shawn Fanning knocked up the code that would become the early peer-to-peer file-sharing service in 1999, he probably wasn't aware that he was about to bring the music industry to its knees and change the entire world as we know it. Whilst MP3s were already floating about the ether in their ones and twos, it was Napster that created a system that allowed users to easily share files and amass large collections of downloaded music.

The music industry, of course, was caught with its pants down and claimed (perhaps rightly) that the service represented a massive violation of copyright laws. Thus began an expansive, expensive and ultimately fruitless campaign of legal action against the site itself and individual file sharers. The music industry took sides and various people came off looking like idiots (that's you, Metallica). The labels did eventually succeed in shutting down Napster in 2001, but by then the digital music horse had well and truly bolted.

The fact that Napster specialised in MP3 files also played a big part in the emergence of the format as the chosen medium for digital music and, despite both Apple (AAC) and Windows' (WMA) best attempts, the MP3 file has held fast.

Did you know... Napster is named after founder Shawn Fanning's college haircut.

ipod

iPod and iTunes: 2001

Rivmixx would like to remind you that, about nine years back, the iPod didn't exist. There were a few MP3 players flying about, but they were - for lack of a better word - a bit rubbish. Steve Jobs - who has pretty much become a household name, or a cult leader, depending on who you ask - decided that Apple could do it themselves and do it better than the competition.

The iPod launched in 2001 and it techno-wizards immediately hailed it as a breath of fresh air in the till-then flawed MP3 player market. It was smaller than the competition, it had a battery life that lasted ten hours (compared to the previous industry leader the Creative Nomad's three hours), it took a fraction of the time to transfer songs through it's firewire cable, its software made it easy to browse myriad albums and the revolutionary scroll-wheel enabled users to speedily locate any artists whose names begin with 'Z'.

iTunes also launched in 2001, but it didn't hit its stride until the iTunes Store was unveiled in April 2003. This also marked the first time Apple really began to exert its dominance over the digital music market. With both the biggest range of digital music files available to purchase legally and the industry's leading MP3 player, the world was Apple's oyster. They're also to blame for the lazy adding of 'i' to anything remotely technological, which became a nightmare for journalists and automatic spell-checkers everywhere.

Did you know... the iPod was only nam ed-so because Apple already had already registered the name for an external drive model?

MySpace & Other New Social Networking Sites: 2003

What's your internet drug of choice? MySpace? Facebook? Twitter? All three? Like it or not, social networking is pretty much an integral part of life in the late naughties. Whilst MySpace may not exactly have come up with the idea, what they did do very well was to nick everything that Australia's Friendster was already doing and combine it with an established company infrastructure.

Original owners eUniverse - of which the famous Tom from MySpace was an employee - had a captive audience (their workers) on which to test the site and gain initial sign-ups. Once confident, they presented the site to eUniverse's ready-made collective of users and mail recipients and the site quickly dominated the competition.

MySpace soon found itself becoming, without design, a must-have for bands and artists who used the site to promote their songs and shows and to interact with their fans. Realising the potential of of bands as an influential sector of the media, the site started to do more to accommodate musicians and new registrations continued to increase. However, it wasn't until the breakthrough success of the Arctic Monkeys that the social network really began to shake some music industry trees and MySpace quickly became the hunting ground for shell-shocked A&Rs.

Nowadays the future's not looking so bright for the site, it's user-base has taken a massive knock from Facebook and new owners (the Rupert Murdoch-owned) News Corporation are frantically looking for new ways to monetize the firm and regain some of the $580 million that they squandered when buying the site. A figure that's now widely thought to have been a massive over-valuation. Still, without it we wouldn't have millions of online "friends" that we don't communicate with, nor an easily available platform for new bands.

Did you know... in the early days of MySpace the site was going to be a paid-for service?

music production

Music Production Software: 2003 - present

Just as MySpace allowed new bands and artists to access their fans directly and reduced the need for traditional distribution channels, at least in the early stages of their careers, advances in music production software meant that recording music was no longer the preserve of the established artist.

The naughties represented a convergence of several points. Firstly, DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) such as Cubase , Pro-Tools and Logic had long developed to a point where they were viable alternatives to analogue equipment. Secondly, the software package became small enough to run on a home PC. And thirdly, as internet speeds increased and piracy became - for better or worse - a realistic option for acquiring new software, bands found that they could download the programs without having to fork out for the (often prohibitively expensive) licenses.

This enabled artists such as the aforementioned Arctic Monkeys (not that we are implying they didn't pay for their software) to learn the basics of production and record serviceable demos without having to find financial backing. They were then able to upload the songs on MySpace and their websites and spread their tracks from fan to fan, relying only on the music and word of mouth for promotion.

One positive side-affect for bedroom producers opting to stay on the right side of the law (that's the legal one, in case you were wondering) was that, due to the increased level of piracy, DAW makers opted to reduce the prices and/or offer smaller "basic" packages to the consumer.

Did you know... DAWs are not just limited to those with big budgets or a flair for piracy, several free open source programs exist. Among the bigger, more reliable names are Audacity and Rosegarden. Check out this wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_software_for_audio) for a more extensive list.

spotify

Free Music Streaming: 2009

The big technology story of 2009, at least in music circles, has undoubtedly been the development and launch of internet streaming. Spotify and We7 have emerged as the forerunners of the UK market and - thanks to its recent acquisitions of iLike and Imeem - MySpace is now positioned as a force to be reckoned with in the US market.

Unlike MP3s, the streaming sites (thus far) require no financial commitment from the user and can be used as quickly and conveniently as music library programs such as iTunes. Spotify, along with Twitter, became a household names this year and Rivmixx for one, has quickly become accustomed to filling its days streaming music. In fact, demand for Spotify has been so large that the streamer has had to return to an invite-only system to slow new sign-ups.

However, it has not been plain sailing and all of the services from Imeem to We7 are dogged by the same problems. The number one worry for the music industry and the streamers themselves is how they will monetize the service. The free services bombard you with adverts, but the rates they demand are currently too low for the likes of Spotify to balance against royalty payments, despite a recent negotiation by the PRS, which lowered them.

The hope of the streamers now seems to lie in the apps market, and many are now offering a premium service, which removes adverts and - in most cases - offers temporary offline storage of playlists, for a monthly subscription charge. However, only a relatively small amount of users are willing to sign-up for the extra services and the key to the streamers' success will be finding ways to successfully encourage this.

Did you know... 'We7 Presents' picks unsigned acts to earn cash from their streams. One of their early picks, Codeine Velvet Club, are currently number four in the Amazon pre-orders chart.

sellaband

Fan Funding: 2009

Another new idea that really rose to prominence this year is the idea of fans directly funding the recording costs of an artist's album. Artists sign up to the service - through firms such as Bandstocks and Sellaband - and their fans are then given the option to buy a certain number of "shares" in the project, at a fixed unit price . Different levels of fan investment offer different rewards, so where an investment of £10.00 might secure a copy of the album and a percentage of the royalties, an investment of £10,000 might allow fans to visit the band in the studio and get a permanent backstage pass to all of their shows. The artists decide upon the packages themselves and they usually offer exclusive shows for the fan investors and signed copies of the records.

It's an idea that had been floating around since 2008, but it wasn't until 2009 that the scheme managed to pull in some big name backers. In the UK, Patrick Wolf has become the poster boy for Bandstocks and managed to successfully fund the recording of his double album 'The Bachelor' and 'The Conqueror' (which he opted to release separately). Across the pond, it's legendary rapper Public Enemy and Sellaband that have been making the headlines.

However, whilst the scheme is a great idea and, as we have seen this year, can be put to effective use, it does not yet appear to be a real solution to the record industry's funding crisis. Public Enemy, for instance, are Sellaband's celebrity endorsees, yet (at $71,000) they remain a long way from their $250,000 target. In addition, it's a fairly useless tool for acts without an established following.

What the schemes do represent is the sort of long-overdue back-end innovation that the record industry has been crying out for and for that reason alone it warrants inclusion on this list.

Did you know... Public Enemy raised $50,000 in two weeks through Sellaband.