What went wrong

What Went Wrong? Samuel-182 Sunday 10 April 2005

I decided to write this article to express my opinions on what the music industry is doing wrong, and what needs to be done to save it. If you disagree with me, good, if you agree with me, good, this is my opinion and I'm not trying to force anyone onto it. Enjoy.

First let's look at some of the reasons the music industry is losing its money, its jobs, and its mind. It all started with a program called Napster. Napster was one of the first popular P2P (peer to peer) file sharing programs. Everyone and their obese parrot used Napster, including me, which I was only in the 4th grade at the time of its launch. This program was controversial because of its ability it gave to the users. You could log into the program, search for any song you liked, and start downloading, easy as that. Then came along the issue of copywrites. For you people that don't know, an artist copywrites his or her song after releasing it to the world. What that means is you cannot reproduce it in any way without the artist's permission, download it without the artist's permission, and other stuff. What a copywrite basically does is protect a song from being "assaulted". This is just the beginning of the music industry's woes. Once P2P programs became REALLY popular, this is when you began to see things really change. Major labels started merging with other labels, people started getting laid off, and record sales declined dramatically.

In steps an agency called the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), they start suing people who downloaded music off these P2P programs. These "people" included teenagers! As young as twelve years old. This not only enraged music lovers but didn't effect the number off people who used the P2P networks. In fact, some companies saw their downloading numbers increase! This began the darkest days of the music industry which still continues today.

Then TV "music" channels suddenly changed, instead of giving people what they wanted, they spoonfed trends to kids who already knew about things for years before these channels did. MTV is a perfect example. They took rap and have torn it apart. Now their ratings are slowly going down due to unhapiness in music variety.

Indie labels in the past few years have gotten a huge boost of support thanks to the internet. Web zines such as absolutepunk.net and others have supported indie bands that are based around a DIY (do it yourself) attitude. Which means they start from the bottom and work their way up. A perfect example of indie record label success is Victory Records and one of their bands, Taking Back Sunday. The bands second album, Where You Want to Be, debuted at #3 on the Billboard Top 100 album charts with little promotion at all from major "music" channels such as MTV and little radio air play. Sadly, TBS are now bigger than Jesus.

In conclusion, the music industry will continue to dwindle unless they start listening to the LISTENERS. The ones who actually know whats in and out. This will be alot more benefical to the labels and to US if they jsut listened. Maybe one day things will change, but for now I'll just enjoy seeing more indie artists get bigger than 50 Cent. =