New Age Distribution

Music distribution has evolved significantly since the dawn of the Internet and yet music publishers and content creators continue struggling to maintain their portions of revenue. Ever since the creation of peer-to-peer file sharing networks and streaming websites that allow consumers to upload and download all of their favorite music free, the music industry has been suffering a decline of physical sales and desperate for a new form of revenue to make up for lost support to content creators, publishers, and everyone in between.

Aside from artists completely cutting out the intermediaries to deal directly with their fans by crowdsourcing an album and the old standby of touring and merchandise sales, digital streaming is now the biggest form of distribution on the rise for the music industry. Selling physical albums through retail stores does not provide the same return on investment as it use to because many people have turned to either online piracy or free streaming services. Spotify, a top streaming service that provides free streaming as well as premium streaming, claims that they are combatting piracy by trying to persuade consumers to pay for music again and that their service will benefit artists more in the long run once the user base expands. This may be true, but royalty receivers are still suffering now from low pay out rates due to the majority of Spotify listeners using the free service and online stores that sell digital downloads of songs like ITunes are beginning to see less sales due to streaming services. Apple is now entering the market with their own streaming service and claims to pay out higher royalties than other services. Even YouTube, a video streaming service, claims to be seeing larger royalty payouts to artists. From all of this, it can be surmised that the average music consumer just wants to hear the music, not necessarily own it. Since the Internet, the market of the music industry is steadily becoming more consumer-controlled. With this in mind, streaming royalty payouts are not nearly as high as what the music industry is used to seeing with physical record sales, but those days are as good as gone and not likely to come back as long as we continue to thrive in the digital age. It is up to the current and future generations to make streaming work for everyone and to continue to innovate.