Discuss the way audience consumption has changed over time
Media type : Music
Today in the twenty-first century anything we want to do or know is at the touch of our fingerprints.
Any movie or TV show we want to watch can be found in minutes. The same thing can be said about
music. Any song or album we can easily find whenever and wherever. In the last 150 years the ways music
is consumed by audiences have changed in many ways. From the phonograph in 1877, to vinyl records
in 1948, to present day music streaming services such as Apple Music and Spotify, music consumption
has become more quick and efficient for audiences.
In 1877 Thomas Eddison created a machine called the phonograph. This device could record sound and then play it back. The music receiver was made from a tin cylinder wrapped in foil and a very small membrane called the diaphragm, which was attached to a needle. Sound waves were directed into the diaphragm, making it vibrate. The vibrations would play back the recorded sound. This was thefirst way to listen to non - live music. Since then music consumption has become modernized like everything else in the world. We can use audio streaming services to look up any song or album within seconds. Let's look at the popular music streaming service, Spotify for an example. Spotify wasfounded in 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon in Stockholm, Sweden. Since then Spotify has become the most popular audio streaming service company world-wide. Globally Spotify has 286 million users which includes 130 million subscribers across 79 markets. In the last year the Spotify stock has been in a high demand. The company has made a gross profit of nearly 490 million dollars and 1.92 billion in revenue, passing all other audio streaming services. These audio streaming service companies have changed the way we consume music. Compacts disks or CDs sales have decreased 18.5 % in the last year. More and more people are going away from buying music and moving towards streaming it instead.Therefore our consumption rates are changing constantly.
Not only has our ways of consumption changed but also the ways artists get compensation has changed as well. As stated from a case study done by Benjamin Fly, University of Arkansas 2016 “ In many cases, the prominence of the royalty is changing dramatically in response to the new era ofstreaming as a relevant method of music consumption." Instead of only receiving a percentage of record sales or radio revenues, artists are now entitled to collect their earnings based on the number of plays they receive from each streaming service.” Seeing how artists' compensations have changed allows us to understand how much music consumption has changed over the years. Going back to my Spotify example, Spotify pays an artist about $0.006 to $0.0084 every time their song is streamed. An artist withone million streams would get around $6000 to $8400. Spotify gets much of its revenue from monthly subscribers and their subsidiaries. Spotify is a conglomerate to many music recording companies.
Companies like Spotify are revolutionizing the way we listen and consume music. Like everything else in this world, music consumption will continue to change and modernize. Audiostreaming services popularity and profit will only continue to go up and grow. We are living in an era that is going away from hard- copies of music. We as a society should embrace the change and recognize that music consumption will always continue to be changing and improving.
