The Digital Music Distribution Revolution

The Digital Music Distribution Revolution

Introduction

The purpose of the paper is to know the emergence, advantages and disadvantages of the digital music distribution revolution. For years were shared files on the network, but now the internet connection conditions allow this system of advanced client-server meets all the conditions for its success. Downloading music from the internet seemed magic because people wanted to experience the magic of having all the music at your fingertips, got the bandwidth, appeared flat rate connections, the size of hard drives grew and grew and some gadgets were invented to take the music to slopes. (Frith, 2009)

Discussion

The case study of the Digital Music Distribution Revolution has few questions that are answered below.

1. The first question was asked about the industry conditions that directed to the revolution of audio distribution and about the most benefited stakeholder from this revolution, the answer is given below.

The industry condition that is the transformation of music (albums and songs) in a digital record format (the mp3) led to the revolution in audio distribution. The digital record format (MP3) made the songs able to be downloaded and played on personal computers. The CD tracks can be now converted into the new format through software programs. The more immense industry condition was the introduction of media sharing applications like the popular Napster that made it easy for the users to share and dole out mp3 formatted songs free of cost between and among users who use the same file sharing applications. The music customer is the most benefited stakeholder in this revolution, above all the one that owns a personal computer can take advantage of the new digital format. The stakeholder can download the songs free of cost and share it among users as well. (Frith, 2009)

2. The second question asks the reason for the failure of attracting subscribers to music stores created by record labels and what different things can record labels do?

The music stores produced by the record labels were unsuccessful to catch the attention of many subscribers for the reason that they drew on the proprietary file formats, strictly restricted digital rights management system, and did not propose the scope of selection accessible by unofficial peer-to-peer services such as Napster (even though) they were previously closed up by a contract with the RIAA), Kazaa or Gnutella. If not anything else, they were supposed to have at least used ...