The online revolution has proved as damaging to independent labels as to multinational companies. How far do you agree?

The online revolution has proved as damaging to independent labels as to multinational companies. How far do you agree?

The online revolution can be described as something that has ultimately destroyed the music industry, or has helped to improve it, although coming with mass amounts of problems it can also add in some major benefits, for example the introduction of services such as Itunes has made it easier for music to be bought, at any time of day or night from the convienience of the consumers household, instead of waiting for shops to open and actually physically going to get it. The use of electronic copies of tracks or albums has also allowed unlimited supply of music in technological form, instead of only being able to be purchased in a physical form where supplies can run out. It can also be argued that music is cheaper on services like Itunes, where the music you want can be downloaded for prices as cheap as 79p and albums being approximately £5 instead of the average of £9 for a new album in the shops. Although instead of buying a whole album the consumer can chose the only songs they want from the album therefore it can be argues that the artist is looseing out because their entire album may not be purchased.

Sadly The Internet Revolution is not all legal, many file sharing sites allow music to be downloaded and shared illegally without any price, this has caused alot of money to be put into stopping illegal download, such as the service Limewire which has recently been closed down after much legal documentation and money being put towards Lawyers. Sites like Napster have been in legal issues with bands such as Heavy Metal group Metallica, where they sewed the company for distributing their music free on the internet, most artists see there music as art and should not be given away for free.

There are services on the internet that allow the audience to stream music online, it is legal because it does not allow the consumer to download illegally but listen to the music for free, larger multinational companies can cope with this sort of service, by signing deals with sites such as Spotify or Myspace, UMG for example made a deal with Myspace that music on the site owned by UMG can only have 30 second previews to encourage the consumer to purchase the music instead of just listen to it, smaller labels suffer in this prospect because they cannot make deals with streaming sites easily and so it is the streaming websites that are more in charge of what they do.

However independant labels can benefit greatly, the ease of access on the internet allows their music to be listened to and purchased far more easily, advertising on services like Spotify is a way to do this, getting their music out there into the public domain.

Smaller labels can also give out their music for free if this is their wish, allowing audiences to be able to listen to the music that would not be easily heard of.
An example of an artist benefitting from the online revolution is the artist Ed Sheeran who managed to get himself heard over Myspace, gaining a huge fan base and even becoming the top of the download charts on Itunes, beating major artists like Rhianna. He has since signed Atlantic Records and is still using the online revolution to get his music out there to boost his reputation and the profit of Atlantic Records.

Multinational companies benefit from the online revolution slightly, they succomb to the ravages of illegal downloading however, they were suited well to the music industry before the online revolution, loseing money to websites like Limewire has made them have to take a different approach to selling their music and Streaming websites like Spotify or We7 have proved to have been an inconvienience for them, needing to keep up with the times by allowing their music to be available for streaming listening, although they are probably loseing more out of this because people are not downloading as much because they can listen to the music whenever they feel they want too. But if they do not fit into the streaming trend they will lose out on possible customers.
The smaller labels however will benefit from the online revolution, allowing their music to be easily put out to the audience.