How far do you think developments in technology have changed the way the music industry operates?

The music industry has been subject to change and development since the implementation of radical new media products within the last 10 years.
In the 1970's and 80's, the only way for illegal recordings to be made and distributed was for people to record the songs from the radio using a cassette.
These days however, due to the change in musical formats, such as mp3's, it is now possible for people to download music from filesharing websites illegally, without paying any money, it involves a simple download and the downloader has the song for free.
This makes the music industry corrupt because it is not possible for all the downloads to be tracked, therefore the charts that used to make a large impact on the music industry is no longer legit, meaning that even though a song has made it to the charts, it doesn't particularly mean it is the most popular at the time, it is just the song that most people have payed for instead of using an illegal download service.
Another way the development of technology has changed the music industry is the introduction to free online streaming sites, that allow a person to listen to the music online via a service such as Spotify or We7, the service is fully legal because the artist gets to decide whether their music is uploaded to it, however it may be that the artist does not particularly want their music to be listened to for free because it causes some people to not bother purchasing or downloading the music because they can listen to it as much as they want but they feel they have to because other artists are allowing their music to be streamed and gaining popularity. Another flaw with streaming is that it is not yet that portable, some services such as Youtube are accessible through portable internet such as using a mobile phone, but the files are not easily accessible on the move.
Sites such as Myspace provide this streaming option, The music label Universal Music Group in 2008 made it so that every artist under their label could only have a 30 second preview of their songs on Myspace to ensure that people were not just streaming their music and not downloading it. This in turn caused the popularity of Myspace to decrease because of the mass size of The Universal Music Group and the vast amount of artists under their name.
The introduction of Apple and Itunes to the music industry ensure that artists could have their music easily downloaded whenever the purchaser wanted too, any song of any album can be purchased for the average price of 79 pence, however artists may find that their entire albums are not downloaded and only particular songs are downloaded, this will cause for a loss of profit for the bands, because when an entire album is purchased it allows the band to gain much profit, even for songs that are not particularly enjoyed but are on the album, but now with the choice is buying single songs it allows the music fan to pick out songs and save money.
An advantage of Itunes is that it allows the artist to upload mini albums or "EP's" that would not usually be accessible to be purchased within shops, it also allows singles and new songs to be purchased and advertised more frequently and easily.
An artist does not particularly need a record label to be put on Itunes or other websites that allow download or music streaming such as Spotify.
The introduction of the internet in its own right allows people to follow bands progress on websites like Twitter and Facebook or even the artists own site, the internet is the best and most efficient way for artists to share their music, although it comes with its disadvantages.
To conclude, the developments in technology has improved the way the music industry operates, it makes it more efficient for bands to be followed and for their music to be purchased, although it comes with its major disadvantages, such as illegal downloading sites such as Limewire which has been closed down due to legal infringement, it can corrupt the way the charts are calculated and can stop bands from gaining money from their music.