Convergence: Sound Recording in the Internet Age

“Todays Internet landscape—with millions of consumers downloading songs from the iTunes Music Store, watching videos on YouTube or Hulu and networking on social media sites like Facebook—can be traced back to the day in early June of 1999 when [eighteen-year-old inventor Shawn] Fanning made Napster available for wider distribution.”

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, 2009

Music, perhaps more so than any other mass medium, is bound up in the social fabric of our lives. Ever since the introduction of the tape recorder and the heyday of homemade mixtapes, music has been something that we have shared eagerly with friends.

It is not surprising then that the Internet, a mass medium that links individuals and communities together like no other medium, became a hub for sharing music. In fact, the reason college student Shawn Fanning said he developed the groundbreaking file-sharing site Napster in 1999 was “to build communities around different types of music.”7

Music’s convergence with radio saved the radio industry in the 1950s. But music’s convergence with the Internet began to unravel the music industry in the 2000s. The changes in the music industry were set in motion about two decades ago with the proliferation of Internet use and the development of a new digital file format.

MP3s and File Sharing

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The MP3 file format, developed in 1992, enables digital recordings to be compressed into smaller, more manageable files. With the increasing popularity of the Internet in the mid-1990s, computer users began swapping MP3 music files online because they could be uploaded or downloaded in a fraction of the time it took to exchange noncompressed music and because they used less memory.

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APPLE’S iPOD, the leading portable music and video player, began a revolution in digital music.

By 1999, the year Napster’s infamous free file-sharing service brought the MP3 format to popular attention, music files were widely available on the Internet—some for sale, some legally available for free downloading, and many traded in violation of copyright laws. Despite the higher quality of industry-manufactured CDs, music fans enjoyed the convenience of downloading and burning MP3 files to CD. Some listeners skipped CDs altogether, storing their music on hard drives and essentially using their computers as stereo systems. Losing countless music sales to illegal downloading, the music industry fought the proliferation of the MP3 format with an array of lawsuits (aimed at file-sharing companies and at individual downloaders), but the popularity of MP3s continued to increase.

In 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the music industry and against Napster, declaring free music file-swapping illegal and in violation of music copyrights held by recording labels and artists. It was relatively easy for the music industry to shut down Napster (which later relaunched as a legal service), because it required users to log into a centralized system. However, the music industry’s elimination of illegal file-sharing was not complete, as decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, such as Grokster, LimeWire, Morpheus, Kazaa, eDonkey, eMule, and BitTorrent, once again enabled online free music file-sharing.

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SPOTIFY became popular in Europe before the streaming service made its U.S. debut in 2011. It has a vast catalog of music, though artists must rack up a lot of plays to see much money. A member of the band Grizzly Bear reported on Twitter that about 10,000 plays nets them, “approximately ten dollars.”

The recording industry fought back with thousands of lawsuits, many of them successful. In 2005, P2P service Grokster shut down after it was fined $50 million by U.S. federal courts and, in upholding the lower court rulings, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the music industry could pursue legal action against any P2P service that encouraged its users to illegally share music or other media. By 2010, eDonkey, Morpheus, and LimeWire had been shut down, while Kazaa settled a lawsuit with the music industry and became a legal service. By 2011, several major Internet service providers, including AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon, agreed to help the music industry identify customers who may be illegally downloading music and try to prevent them from doing so by sending them “copyright alert” warning letters, redirecting them to Web pages about digital piracy, and ultimately slowing download speeds, or closing their broadband accounts.

As it cracked down on digital theft, the music industry also realized that it would have to somehow adapt its business to the digital format and embraced services like iTunes (launched by Apple in 2003, to accompany the iPod), which has become the model for legal online distribution. In 2008, iTunes became the top music retailer in the United States, surpassing Walmart, and by 2013 iTunes had sold more than twenty-five billion songs. Even with the success of Apple’s iTunes and other online music stores, illegal music file-sharing still accounts for four out of five music downloads in the United States.8

Music in the Stream, Music in the Cloud

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If the history of recorded music tells us anything, it’s that over time tastes change and formats change. While artists take care of the musical possibilities, technology companies are developing formats for the future. One such format is “music in the cloud,” which eliminates the physical ownership of music entirely. This format first became popular with streaming radio services like Pandora, where users can create personalized Internet music radio channels for free (Pandora is financed by ads), although they can’t select individual songs. Then came subscription music services, including MOG, Rhapsody, Rdio, Audiogalaxy, AudioBox, and the popular European service co-owned by major music labels, Spotify, which made its debut in the United States in 2011. With these services, listeners can pay a monthly subscription of $5 to $10 and instantly play millions of songs on demand via the Internet. Three major media companies also jumped on the “cloud-based music” bandwagon in 2011. Although users still need to purchase copies of individual songs, Amazon’s Cloud Player, Google Music, and Apple’s iCloud provide users with a “storage locker” on the Web for their music, so they can access it almost anywhere, on almost any Internet-connected device.