The Music Industry, Marketing

Due to the high demand for music, bands/artists seem to be giving away their music for free. The majority of people, mainly of the younger generation, are no longer going into stores and buying albums, instead a new phenonemon has been discovered. Downloading music is now the most popular of accessing music as it takes a matter of minutes and can be done without having to go out. However as technology has developed for the downloading problems have occured. Some sites such as 'Linewire' allow people to download music for free, no charge at all. This therefore has a ripple effect as major music labels such as Sony, Universal and Motown are not making enough royalties therefore not making any profit. Reportedly Richard Branson had to drop the Virgin Megastores which lost him more than £50 million in 2007, this was one of the first visible signs that illegal downloading was not going to let up. Bands/artists have now had to develop another way to make money from their music. One of the positive effects illegal downloading has had on the music industry is that bands/artists are now known as their music has been free people are able to download whatever they want and therefore if they like the song they download more from the same band/artist. Which provides great publicity for them. This consequently means that bands/artists are known and can set up gigs and concerts in which people would have to pay for their tickets, this would lead on to merchandising and make profits this way. Bands/artists are now longer making money out of their music but now through their popularity. Sites such as Facebook and Myspace are popular ways for bands/artists to promote their music and upcoming events. http://www.myspace.com/madonna Madonna was one of the first artists to use Myspace to promote her music and this soon became popular. YouTube is also a popular site for bands/artists to promote their music, you can't download straight from the website but there is a link leading to the iTunes website to download the song. YouTube allows you to listen to the music before you buy it and you can continuously listen to the song repeatedly as well as view their music video if they have created one. http://www.facebook.com/madonna Her site on Facebook allows fans to access photos of her and can see the dates of her concerts and single releases. This benefits her as it is publicity for her. A band that have been successful from viral file sharing is the band Nizlopi with their song 'JCB', they didn't want to be signed with a record label as they saw what was happening with the downloads and how bands/artists weren't making much money. So they decided to record their song and they then sent it in an email to 20 people and they then sent on to their friends and this was repeated, which created huge success. http://www.jcbsong.co.uk/ http://www.nizlopi.com/ These sites are for the band and the 'JCB' song, both advertise new songs and downloads