How Technology Has Transformed Music

There doesn’t seem to be an industry devoid of digital disruption. The way in which we enjoy world music has undergone several transformations…
Like many aspects of our lives, music has been irrevocably changed by the advent of the internet. During the 20th century there were perhaps only three significant evolutions in the physical media used to supply music: gramophone to vinyl, vinyl to cassette, and cassette to CD. Each platform was heralded as the future of music and went on to achieve market dominance. Yet since the turn of the millennium we have already seen a welter of competing platforms and methods of ownership. So what can we expect the future of music to sound like?
Rewind to the year 2000, and many people were acquiring new albums through illegal file sharing platforms like Kazaa and Morpheus. CD sales fell off a cliff, and complacent record labels suddenly found themselves struggling to justify their high prices. The collapse of Virgin Records and Tower Music amongst others can be directly attributed to this digital revolution, while HMV only just survived.
The lack of loyalty shown towards a time-honoured (if hardly celebrated) business model shocked many record label executives, although it was merely a portent of how music consumption would change. People weren’t downloading music just because it was free – it also fitted in with their lifestyles. Portable music players like Apple’s iPod (remember your first one?) were sweeping the nation, and the concept of inserting a 4.75” plastic disc into a bulky machine that had to be kept horizontal at all times suddenly seemed rather outmoded. Digital music was far more suited to the modern world, and what better way to acquire it than over the internet?
As broadband replaced dial-up, connection speeds soared, and suddenly it wasn’t necessary to “enjoy” MP3s that sounded like they were being played down a plughole. Encoding rates increased from a modest 96kbps up to 320kbps – still the highest ratio that can be achieved when ripping music into Windows Media Player. Meanwhile, the record industry had belatedly realised that it would have to supply a viable alternative to the likes of Napster, rather than simply launching expensive lawsuits against file-streaming sites.
Rather predictably the music industry was too slow to act, and as a result today’s digital music industry is dominated by Amazon and Apple. This is where most people go to purchase music, with the likes of HMV also now offering online sales of MP3 albums and singles. However, the concept of purchasing individual albums or songs is itself under threat, and it’s entirely possible that the future of music will look more like Netflix than the iTunes store.
Despite the recent demise of popular streaming service Grooveshark, today’s vogue is increasingly towards taking a monthly subscription and streaming all your music. A set fee provides unlimited quantities of downloading, while offline services enable a (usually substantial) number of tracks to be downloaded onto a single device and played during plane journeys or in situations where bandwidth is slow or expensive. Grooveshark’s collapse came about because it didn’t acquire licences for the copyrighted music its users could stream, and the record industry sued it for hundreds of millions of pounds. Its rivals haven’t made the same mistake.
While the likes of Spotify and Beats Music represent the legitimate side of streaming, they have often suffered with poor-quality audio that’s been overly compressed to minimise bandwidth. The new Tidal music service aims to avoid such issues, by making digital files available at a remarkable 1411kbps. That should be enough to silence the critics who have always claimed internet-supplied music loses depth and detail compared to more traditional forms of encoding, although conventional compressed file sizes are available for limited-bandwidth situations.
There seems no reason why Tidal and Spotify can’t do for music what Amazon Prime and Netflix have done for TV programmes. With superfast broadband due to arrive across the UK by 2020, and 5G already well into development, it looks increasingly likely that our music consumption in future will be through low-compression streaming sites rather than physical CDs or purchased MP3 files. The evolution of music consumption continues apace.
What lies ahead for the music industry? Is Tidal the answer to audio that lacks in quality? Let us know at @VPS.NET.