Digital Technologies and Contemporary Patterns of Music - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages... The rapid growth in the digital music market has received a major boost from the ever-increasing popularity of various online music download stores such as various streaming services and iTunes. Modern music consumers are spoilt for options in the possible methods that are at their disposal through which they can be able to acquire new music. These sources range from a wide variety of several non-paid and paid legitimate sources to some other unlawful channels. The impact of the use of digital technology in music production and distribution and the subsequent impact on music consumption is a topic that has been seen to draw a wide variety of comments from several legal experts, pundits, scholars and the music industry (Halsey and Wooley 2009).
 The traditional economic and social arrangements that used to surround the production and distribution of music are breaking down at an ever accelerating rate and markets are becoming more consolidated. This paper seeks to establish just how the use of these digital technologies can be seen to be impacting the modern consumer’s consumption of music.
 Several decades before the advent and widespread use of the Internet, the music industry was seen to be relatively healthy and its worldwide sales were seen to peak considerably in 1998 (Baym, 2010). Since this peak, the spread of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, such as Napster have greatly contributed towards the overall decline in the general sale of CDs. The monopoly that was being exercised by reproduction of high-quality reproductions was effectively eliminated with the digitization of music such that the illegal copies being reproduced were now being produced having equal quality standards to the original music (May 2007). Concomitantly, the production of intangible digitized music has resulted in the emergence of new consumption practices.
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