Assignment #1 - Music Criticism

Over the last decade there have been drastic changes in the way music notoriety is measured. In the Golden Years of music every ounce of success derived from album sales and radio play. Now with music streaming and downloads being the norm, if you master the digital sector of music you have the "keys to the streets". The criticism I have regarding today's music as a whole is how it's in no way comparable to music back then. I don't know anyone personally that still buys compact discs at all. Why would you buy compact discs when you practically live on your phone anyway? The music quality is still decent and the influence of the pre-streaming era is still prevalent, but album sales of this age will never be able to hold a flame a candle to the sales when compact discs were king and the shift has shifted up revenue for the music industry. The New York Times reports, "Revenue from music sales in the United States has hovered around $7 billion since 2010, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. For 2015, the number was $7.02 billion, up slightly less than 1 percent from 2014. Within that steady total, however, have been drastic shifts in listener behavior. CDs and downloads have been gradually abandoned as streaming has become the platform of choice.

The result is that the music industry finds itself fighting over pennies while waving goodbye to dollars. For instance, the growing but still specialized market for vinyl records is generating more revenue than the music on YouTube, one of the biggest destinations on the Internet, but that’s because YouTube pays royalties in the tiniest fractions of cents." NY Times
Further explicating the drastic change in revenue, The Atlantic reports, "Digitization and illegal downloads kicked it all off. MP3 players and iTunes liquified the album. That was enough to send recorded music's profits cascading. But today the disruption is being disrupted: Digital track sales are falling at nearly the same rate as CD sales, as music fans are turning to streaming—on iTunes, SoundCloud, Spotify, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and music blogs. Now that music is superabundant, the business (beyond selling subscriptions to music sites) thrives only where scarcity can be manufactured—in concert halls, where there are only so many seats, or in advertising, where one song or band can anchor a branding campaign." The Atlantic