Media Convergence

What are your veiws on the way convergence has affected the music industry?

Convergence has had a massive impact on the music industry in the past few years. Audiences used to be passive, but now, due to the changes in technology, audiences have become much more active. Audiences have always been a bit active because they have been attending the artists’ gigs, but now they have gone beyond that. The iPhone is a perfect example of how convergence has helped the music industry and made the audience more active. The iPhone allows you to share and listen to music, and has many different applications that you can download. You can download a Spotify application onto your iPhone, which allows you to stream music straight onto your phone. With the Spotify application there is no need to actually ‘own’ the music. However, if you want to listen to the music without any adverts getting in the way, you have to pay for a monthly subscription; a percentage of that money goes to the record labels, so they get the money they deserve. You can also have access to the internet, so you can use sites such as YouTube, which has thousands of music videos on that you can watch for free, anytime you want. An application called Shazam has recently been developed; if someone hears a song on the radio that they don’t know the name of, this application will recognize the song for them. This really helps the record labels, because people will buy more of their songs.

There is still a big problem that is affecting the music industry; illegal downloading and file sharing. Applications like Spotify were created to combat illegal downloading because people can have the music streamed straight to their phone or computer; the only problem with this is they don’t actually ‘own’ the music so they can’t do what they can’t do what they want with it (e.g. put it on an MP3 player). This might tempt people to illegally download music so they can actually ‘own’ it without having to pay anything. New phones, such as the iPhone have Bluetooth, which allows people to send files from one phone to another. This means that the person now ‘owns’ the track and can now so whatever they want with it, which is bad for the music industry because they don’t get their revenue.

Record labels have had to try different ways to get revenue because they are losing money fast due to all the illegal downloading and file sharing; they have used the ideas of synergy and cross promotion. Universal Music Group have managed to get some of their revenue from letting the TV program Glee do covers of some of the music from the label. Domino records also lent an Arctic Monkey’s song to be used in Guitar Hero; they have been able to get lots of revenue from this.