How the Internet Changed Music Part 3: Listening and Discovery

It’s easy to be blasé about it now, but the fact you can walk round with thousands of tracks stored on a miniature gizmo is an incredible thing. What would have seemed space age little over a decade ago has become commonplace. On top of this, the Internet has completely changed the way the public at large purchases and consumes music. The vast majority of single sales are now from digital stores such as iTunes and piracy is rife. It’s all too easy - not to mention an enormous temptation - to find a torrent of a new record, and although it’s difficult to visualise a direct link between your actions and an artist struggling to make ends meet, professionals need to be remunerated for their work. It’s a familiar theme, and one that’s already been discussed with regards to journalism.

But as well as changing the way we purchase and access music, has the Internet changed how we actually listen to music? Music Week’s digital editor Eamonn Forde certainly thinks so: “Things like iTunes have flipped it away from the idea of ‘a body of work’ to tracks. So, that’s almost thrown us back to the 1950s where it was all about singles. Album sales have struggled along but single sales are booming; digital has completely revived the singles market. Now, around 3 million singles are sold in the UK every week; it’s phenomenal.”

It appears that however you create a new product or technology, the public will utilise it as they see fit. Acts such as The Beatles may have resisted making their music available via iTunes for years (though that was also to do with a legal wrangle over the Apple name) but even they relented in late 2010. Though single sales are on the up, this doesn’t necessarily represent good news for record companies who make the most profit through album sales. Maybe this will make artists up their game though; in the future, perhaps they won’t be able to get away with two or three tracks of filler if they know buyers are going to cherry pick the songs they want.

The popularity of single track downloads is also bad news for traditionalists who see an album as a cohesive whole with a carefully chosen track order to be listened to in its entirety. Guardian and Word Magazine journalist Jude Rogers puts herself firmly in that camp: “I went through a huge period when I first had iTunes and an iPod of having your whole record collection on shuffle - it was so exciting. Something would come up that you hadn’t listened to for ages, but I’m getting a bit tired of that. Maybe it’s me getting older, I like to listen to records from beginning to end and remember what it’s like to know exactly what’s coming next from song to song.” As well as people conforming to this listening trend, the sheer ubiquity of music also reinforces the idea of it as a commodity of little value. It’s fantastic to be able to purchase an act’s entire back catalogue at the click of a button, but gone are the days of investing time in a record and coming to love it. If an album has no immediate impact, it’s likely to be consigned to the virtual scrapheap without even a cursory second listen. This pattern has worked its way into the industry, where an act is unlikely to be given money to make an album if their debut isn’t a huge smash. Artists need to develop, and it’s interesting to consider in today’s cutthroat climate whether Bob Dylan or The Beach Boys would have been given the time to reach the heights of Blonde on Blonde or Pet Sounds.

The Internet has revolutionised the music industry, and Apple in particular have been huge beneficiaries of this. But Apple don’t always get it spot on. Take Ping, a social networking application built into iTunes which came into our lives in 2010. Designed as a service for friends to recommend music to one another, Steve Jobs described Ping as “sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes.” Yet without Facebook integration, it’s difficult to see who’s going to want to go through the bother of setting up the new profiles and friends lists that a Ping account would require. In a world of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pandora and last.fm amongst others, do we really need Ping? Eamonn Forde is sceptical: “I think for Apple to have been the pioneer of hardware and software elegance and really brilliant user interfaces for ten years, to throw this weird, almost apologetic, so-called social network in iTunes, buried in this little link where you have to open it up and wait for it to load; it’s just so cumbersome and fiddly. It looks like a really, really poor version of Facebook. I tried to give it a go and I just really didn’t see the point and I don’t think Apple really know what it’s for. I think it’s symbolic of Apple’s arrogance and I think it’s symbolic of the fact that Apple have actually faltered for the first time.”

Apple may have been the leaders in online music throughout the 21st Century, but as well as the relative failure of Ping, they also have to keep their eye on the new kid on the block: Spotify. Though currently unavailable outside of Europe, the online music streaming service has around ten million users and approximately the same number of tracks. It’s the equivalent of having the world’s largest iTunes library and what‘s more, it’s free! So, as it’s all legal and above board, that must mean that artists are paid royalties for streams of tracks, so how does Spotify make money? Through a subscription model, where for a monthly fee, users get unlimited access, no adverts and premium features such as Android/iPhone integration. Eamonn Forde shares his take on it: “The issue with Spotify is that it can only go so frequent with the advertising otherwise it drives people away. It’s a very, very tricky balance because they’re going for the subscription model but learning it’s a very slow build. They’ve got a 6.5% conversion rate, they’re very much heading in the right direction, but whether or not the business model can sustain it while it rises up until that time when they get double digit [percentage] subscribers; it’s debateable whether they’ve got enough capital to ride that through, because they’re losing money at the minute.” It’s clearly an incredible application and you have to wonder if Apple could keep their stronghold were Spotify to go global. It’s difficult to see why anyone would use iTunes for anything other than syncing their iPod or iPhone if there’s a practically infinite amount of music available through Spotify. Bad news for Ping and for Apple, but more good news for the consumer.

Yet again it comes back to the question of the value of music (which could probably be extended to include art in general). It sounds obvious, but someone who has saved up to buy a record will treasure it more than someone who can listen to it for free whenever and wherever they want. Consumers are unlikely to worry about the finances of record companies and the long-term sustainability of the business in the here and now. When so much is instantly available, the main issue the music fan of 2011 is likely to face is being overwhelmed by choice. Word of mouth is still the most effective form of recommendation, and this links back to the numerous bloggers evangelising about their favourite tracks online.

The epitome of this sharing and recommending attitude is the Hype Machine: an mp3 blog aggregator set up in 2005. The Hype Machine collates recommendations and posts from the ‘blogosphere’ so users have an up-to-the-minute snapshot of what people are talking about and listening to. In theory, it’s a fantastic tool; in reality, it’s so bleeding-edge it will make you feel depressingly out of touch within minutes. That said, it’s still an invaluable resource and another example of the collective power the Internet wields. As with the bloggers themselves, if all music is equally available, the cream should rise to the top and true innovation will be rewarded.

The Internet has changed the way we listen to and acquire music to such an extent that the musical landscape is now completely unrecognisable to that of two decades ago. The collaborative spirit of the Internet (embodied nowhere better than on Wikipedia) and almost universal access in the Western world mean that consumers are now just kids in a giant virtual playground. Right now, we’re making hay while the sun shines, and that hides something altogether more worrying lurking just beneath the surface - just how long can we go on like this? People will always listen to and make music, regardless of financial constraints, but what about the artists on the bottom rung of the ladder, those who are now embarking on a potential career in popular music? Has the Internet helped or hindered their chances.

Read part 4 at http://www.noripcord.com/features/how-internet-changed-music-part-4-new-artists