We have come a long way from buying CD's and playing them on our discmans. Everything is online now and conventional radio and music stores seem to be getting replaced by online purchases via iTunes etc. However, is it possible that online purchases themselves might be put in the back seat compared on free streaming? The title of the article "Justin Timberlake Made a Fortune Giving His Album Away", indicates how being a part of the free online streaming system may benefit artists more than they may think. Consumers nowadays may not settle for the few seconds of preview offered by iTunes and instead need to listen to the whole track or album before making a decision whether to purchase or not. In Justin Timberlake's case, this worked extremely well as his new album was streamed nearly 7.7 million times. This highlights a significant trend in the music industry as we see people testing out albums online via free streaming and then purchasing the material good enough to make it into their smartphone/iPod library. It would be interesting to see how such a change in the online music industry affects artists and how their sales respond to shifts in consumer purchasing patterns.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-29/justin-timberlake-made-a-fortune-giving-his-album-away#r=most popular
I think this is great for consumers. There is far too much bad music out there. Musicians need to be held to a better standard and it makes sense for people to be able to hear the whole album before purchasing it.
ReplyDeleteDoing this can cause profits to go down because of free online streaming. People that know how to use a computer which is about almost everybody now will probably figure a way out to get the songs online for free cause sells to go down making their profits to go down as well. This is a positive for the costumer but a negative for the seller.
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