The music industry has evolved drastically over the years. From starting out only as a luxury for the wealthy to enjoy to appearing in everything such as TV advertisements, movies, games etc. It is extremely rare to find something that doesn't have a catchy jingle or an artists' music playing in the background. The main reason for this is that technology has become very advanced over the years, even changing the music industry itself, to the point where music can be made, shared and consumed with ease.
In the early days of making music, music wasn't open to the public compared to the present day. At that point in time, music was about quality. It wasn’t about what the artist had for dinner the night before. It wasn’t about what they wore to an award show it was just about the artist and their art. When the singles and albums got commercial success they were usually backed up by critical acclaim by reviewers. Nowadays a song could be panned by the critics but now as some artists are seen as idols their fans will buy anything they'll put out. Good or bad. Everyday when we look in a magazine or a newspaper there is some scandal going on about an artist. When do we ever really see and artist being spoken about in these outlets solely because of their work? In the past the public wanted albums to buy but it seems as if the general public wants to see drama more than art. Even MTV which started off as a channel which showed music videos now only shows reality shows. The public are now more interested in fame rather than music and visuals.
It seems like the digital era has made some artists and musicians lazy. When people had to record the analog way they had limited takes. With limited takes the players/artists had to know what they were doing. With digital recording you can record over 100 times and if you still don't like these recordings you can delete them and record more. In a way it's made some artists become complacent in what they do. As editing isn't limited either even if you make mistakes in the vocal you can use auto tune or melodyne to correct notes and many people wouldn't be able to tell. The digital era has made music much easier to make. We have Logic Pro, Protools, Garageband etc. With these you can record and create your own tracks. You don't even need to be able to play an instrument all the sounds of the instruments are in these programs. In the past these programs didn't exist. Along with limited takes, there was limited editing. For certain effects on the voice you needed to hook up your mic with pre-amps before hand instead of doing it after on a computer. Also you needed to record your instruments instead of using them from a program. With limited editing the singers/artists level of talent was much higher than it is now. Their sense of pitch couldn't be wavering all the time and they couldn't go flat when going for bigger notes as they didn't have 100 takes.
Branding has become a big part of the industry. Many artists and musical events have become associated with brands such as Pepsi, Coca Cola, H&M etc. It would be very rare to see a huge music event without a big brand backing it. For example: Glastonbury is sponsored by BBC TV/BBC Radio, the Superbowl Halftime Show is sponsored by Pepsi. Not only events use branding. Sometimes brands pay or sponsor a label to put an item of theirs in an artist's music video. They usually use bigger artists for this so when their fans see these videos they'll be influenced to buy it. So the artist in a way does the advertising for the product. Intern this makes up for the money that labels have lost in recent years due to the lack of record sales.
Music videos weren't always around. Music videos actually weren't around until MTV came about in 1981. Before that other than buy music the way you would hear it is on the radio. Record labels basically controlled what we heard. They would pay for their artists to be played on the radio stations and that's what you heard but when music videos came about people were starting to focus on the visual aspect of music not just the sound so with that radio airplay started to decline.
Before the digital era of music began the sales figures of music were much higher. People supported there artists as there wasn't as many ways to illegally get music. In 1999, Napster was created. Napster was arguably one of the main causes for music sales going down. Napster was basically a way people could get singles/albums of an artist for absolutely nothing. The files were mp3 files and were shared easily. Napster had around 80 million registered users. Although it was sued and closed down people nowadays are more likely to illegally download online rather than buy something although we now have iTunes. iTunes is a legal way of getting our music and is one of the main ways people buy their music nowadays whereas before people would go to the store and actually buy physical copies of CDs/tapes/vinyls. Slowly the sales of physical music go down more and more every year while the digital sales go up.
We are currently living in the Singles Era rather than the Albums Era. Blurred Lines a single by artist Robin Thicke was one of the best selling singles of 2013 selling 14.8 million copies worldwide with 7 million 5 thousand of those sales being in the US alone which is more than impressive but then on the other side of the spectrum his album of the same name has only sold 7 hundred thousand in the US which is a large difference in numbers. In the past single sales and album sales usually reflected each other but now you can have an amazing selling single with lacklustre album sales. This effects the artist and the label severely. Creating an album takes a lot of time and money. From booking recording studio time, planning promotion (which for bigger artists could mean live performances, talk shows etc), photo shoots, music video shoots all of this together is very costly. In the past the record labels would be getting back the money through the sales but now record labels are not getting their money back for all these things and aren't making as much profit as they would before the digital age.
With digital age being on the rise labels aren't just losing money because music isn't selling. Music can now be done as a do it yourself job. With all these new programs artists can do what in the past could only be done in recording studios at home. With Logic Pro, Protools etc we can create our own songs at home plus record our own instruments/vocals as well. We also have various websites such as YouTube, Soundcloud, band camp and more where we can put our music out there without the help of the record labels. In a way you could say that record labels could very well be out the door soon and the independent artists could be reigning over the industry. Doing things the independent way also means artists can keep majority of the money from their work rather than sharing it with their labels.
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