How the music industry has been affected by the internet and digital downloading By Peter Harris

The current state of the music industry In the 90s music consumption meant going to record stores and buying CDs (compact disks) Previous to this vinyl was used but wasn't as portable, as well as tapes which had poor audio quality and were prone to breaking in tape players. CDs were the beginning of digital music made from 1s and 0s and the last step in physical media before mp3 compression

MP3 compression MP3 compression, the internet and portable MP3 players brought in a more convenient era of music listening Entire music library's could be stored into your pocket for easy access

The audio on a CD is converted from an analog source, or more commonly directly to digital these days Analog waves cannot be recorded digitally so a digital audio processor is used to sample the analog audio waves 44,100 times a second meaning at every tick the digital processor works out the amplitude of the original audio wave The amplitude values are stored directly on to the CD as a series of pits that are read by the laser in an optical drive. CD storage capacity = 74 minutes ≈ 60 seconds per minute ≈ 44,100 samples per second ≈ 2 bytes per sample ≈ 2 channels = 783,216,000 bytes or 747MB

Nowadays, thanks to the cloud, online streaming services mean people can pay a monthly fee to gain access to virtually all music These sites include Spotify, Itunes, Deezer, Tidal, Amazon and many more Streaming music is much cheaper and more efficient However due to increased popularity of streaming CDs are starting to become obsolete. As an example the American retailer Best Buy have decided to pull all CDs from it’s stores by July 2018.

Types of portable MP3 players The first portable MP3 player, the MPman launched in 1997 and stored only 6-12 songs Many similar devices followed but like the MPman also had low storage capacities and weighed a lot It wasn't until 2001 when Apple launched the first iPod when things improved as it had a storage capacity of up to 5.8gb with a small and sleek design

Music Piracy With the development of the Internet also came piracy, where people would no longer pay for CDs and instead torrent music though peer to peer websites such as Napster. Many people would pirate music due to how expensive CDs were, however this was bad for artists who would be getting their content stolen.

History of Napster Napster was an mp3 music streaming services that was invented in 1999 by brothers Shawn and John Fanning. It allowed, at its peak, around 80 million users to discover and download millions of mp3’s for free

What is Napster? Napster was created after Shawn Fanning dropped out of University in 1999 and quickly became the worlds largest community for sharing music files. It was a useful resource for people looking to download rare bootleg albums swell as the latest chart toppers. It was the first major music streaming service It allowed people to gain access and download thousands of songs for free

How did it impact the music industry? The music industry became oversaturated as a result of how easy it was to upload and share music online There was a lack of control on copyrighted material artists saw less royalties due to their music being shared around freely

The downfall of Napster The RIAA (Recording industry Association of America) soon became aware of Napster’s illegal activities Metallica’s drummer Lars Ulrich filed a lawsuit against Napster standing up for artists rights

Conclusion The internet has much more power than the music industry today Streaming and online music services have taken over digital downloads and physical media As a result people have easy access to a wider range of music and are able to gain a following online via social media when sharing their own music challenging the traditional notion of record ldeals