The Effects Of The Internet: Music Distribution

By Tom Colohue | December 25, 2009

OOne line I’m well known for is the following: In The Modern World, The Internet Is King.

This relates to much more than the piece that it was originally written for. The music business is one thing that definitely falls under the category of “recently influenced by the internet”.

The Internet is an incredible tool, allowing instantaneous connection between multiple people from absolutely anywhere in the world. File sharing, broadcast and internet marketing have given musicians the tools that they need to break into the world of modern media, sell albums and songs to an entirely new market and generally just get themselves out there.

This is a phenomenon often examined, but one thing that’s rarely highlighted is the affect that internet distribution has had on record labels. Instead of only being able to sell CDs in dedicated music stores, supermarkets and catalogue superstores, singles are now available for sale via iTunes, and multiple other music manufacturers. This keeps things both fresh and available to a worldwide audience; a group much larger than those that the bands of old would have available to them. If you had an album on vinyl, how exactly do you tell your friend across the ocean what your favourite band is like.

Record labels have always made a decent amount of money. If you look to the example of the British rock band Deep Purple and their management team of Edwards and Colletta, the management was making almost all of the money from every album and tour. In addition, the band were required to put out more albums and EPs than any modern band seems to be able to manage. While some modern bands take three to five years to make one follow up album, Deep Purple was knocking out three albums a year while touring to no end. You would think that the money they earn, in comparison to your modern band, would be more than enough to make up for it. Shall we correct this idea?

As the career of Deep Purple was on the rise, after several albums and tours, their guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore, was being interviewed. He was being interviewed on the bus to his own gig, because he couldn’t afford to have a car or a helicopter sent. He had his equipment with him too. In the attempt to show the interviewer how he wrote music, the song Highway Star was conceived, right there on the bus, surrounded by people.

Do you honestly think that your typical musician of the modern era would take a bus to their own gig? Can you see Madonna, Matt Bellamy or the Black Eyed Peas taking a bus anywhere?

Before the internet, and back in the days when labels and bands were making less money, artists could honestly say that they weren’t in it for the money. They never made any; all that they made was music. The major downside of the internet, as described by most record labels and artists, is illegal file downloads. Record labels and artists are all losing money every time somebody illegally downloads one of their tracks.

Yet, somehow, they’re still richer than ever before. Is it just me, or does it sort of look like they’re not being completely honest with us?

Tom Colohue is a fiction writer and music instructor from Blackpool, England. Though his main works are in the realms of fantasy, he also writes modern fiction for multiple websites, as well as theoretical and practical music lessons for magazines.