In the first two decades of the digital age, technological innovations have evolved to threaten the economic health of major music companies. Nowadays these innovations in the form of music streaming services, seems to be the rebound of the music industry. Streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music charge their customers a monthly rate for unlimited access to their music libraries. More and more users are attracted to the music business, because of these digital music services. According to IFPI, there was an increase of 6.9% in revenue in the music industry. But are those digital services really the rescuers of the music industry?
The rapid growth in the use of music streaming services nowadays seems to halt piracy and peer-to-peer file sharing in music. For example, Stephen Witt in his book “How music got free” is talking about how consumer research showed that new Spotify subscribers stopped pirating more or less completely. Because of those digital music services, artists finally get paid for their hard work. This is obviously a positive outcome.
However, artists don’t always get a fair cut of the revenues that are earned by those music streaming services. The payout for the songwriters is even worse; the songwriter of Clique by Kanye West only got paid 60 dollars while this song was streamed 76 million times (Fusion, 2015)! Artists like Taylor Swify, Jay Z and Adele already took their music offline as a kind of protest, in order to force improvement of artists’ royalties.
Due to the popularity of online music streaming services, there is an upcoming generation of music fans who take instant access to music for granted. A lot of those people will probably never experience the feeling of spending their hard-earned cash on records and having a collection of CD’s. It almost seems as if these modern-day innovations are wiping away an essential part of our culture.
In my opinion, music streaming services are a good thing since it makes music accessible for everyone and stops piracy. However, I think that artists should use those services as an investment to promote their work. They should make it somehow attractive for their fans to keep buying records for the real music experience. This way music streaming services are not the final destination and destruction of music, but just a way of getting in touch with fans.
What do you think of music streaming services?
