Research: state of the music industry

The music industry has changed considerably over the last 10 years, I can remember only a few years ago when everyone was listening to CD's on their walk-mans and now hardly anyone even buys hard copies of tracks anymore, and even fewer people bother to pay for mp3 versions; preferring instead to download as much music as they like for free on illegal websites such as lime wire, or video2mp3

Because of the fact that people no longer pay for the actual songs they are listening to, the music industry has had to find new ways to make money; they mostly do this by promoting the artist themselves as well as the music, this way money can be made through tours and merchandise etc. so the artists are promoted through music videos; this is why the videos are so crucial and so much time and money is spent on them in comparison to music videos in the 90's. In fact, some videos are even being made into short films e.g Lady Gaga- 'Telephone', or Katy Perry- 'Friday night'

Artists also make money through advertisement; for example, The Saturdays' video for 'Notorious' where they advertise the make up brand 'Barry M' as it would appeal to their target audience of 16-21 year old females.

The music industry has also tried other approaches to make people actually buy the music they are listening to; the band Radiohead has recently released an album with an "honesty box" approach, where the fans could pay however much they thought the album was worth: fans would pay enough to support their favourite band and this was their approach to making more money, they also released a 'special edition' of the album with added extras including a host of artwork, which went on sale for £33. However, i think this approach will only work for very well known artists with a strong fanbase who would be willing to pay for that little bit extra.