How has internet affected the relationship between audiences and institutions?

Twenty years ago, internet did not exist in the eyes of the music industry and the general public. Since there was no internet, music was to be bought as a solid product: vinyl, CD, minidisk or cassettes. This was an equal balance, the customers go to the music shop to purchase an item whilst the shop owner stocks the items made by the record labels. However, this all changed in 1999 when Shawn Fanning created Napster.

Napster was a small network created by Fanning during his undergraduate course in Boston University. Being able to swap perfect digital copies of music for free, the network grew massively outside Fanning’s university campus, far out of his imagination. A total of 85 million people started to use Napster globally.

Napster created outrage within the music industry, especially with the money-hungry conglomerates.  Not only were the record labels angry, the artists were too especially one band who decided to sue Shawn Fannings. Metallica sued Fannings and ended up getting a bad reputation as some artists thought they only did it for the money. Other artists did not sue Fannings as they believe he managed to share the music with other people, making the artist themselves better known to others. After two years of legal battle, Napster was shut down as a free downloading site.

The Napster incident shook the music industry like an earthquake. It caused an evolution, a culture change, just a year before the 21^st century. Music lovers realised there were ways on the internet where you can get music without any charge. Piracy and peer-to-peer websites were born and then even extended out to other Medias such as downloading movies and expensive software for no charge, but illegally.

Piracy websites become much more appealing than buying CDs from the music store since it was free, convenient and no need to store the big CD cases somewhere in your room since downloaded music are stored on the computer. This meant customers would stop buying the copyright music resulting to a massive loss in money for the record labels. From 2007 to 2012, the estimated loss for both conglomerate and independent labels is said to be £1.2billion. As the customers drift away from the record label, the trading relationship between customers and the labels broke down.

After realising what piracy is doing, the labels become active to get their customers back. Conglomerates like Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, EMI and Abu Dhabi collaborated in making Vevo. Vevo is a music streaming website where internet users can listen and watch the music video for free. However it is only streamed online so the audience do not actually own the music, only listening. The conglomerates made money from several advertisements between each video as well as merchandise.

We7 is also set up by conglomerates (Sony BMG). We7 is another streaming music website. They earn money by getting fans to subscribe monthly so they don’t have to listen to adverts beforehand. Vevo and We7 are both conglomerates’ weapons to fight the on-going piracy battle. With Vevo and We7, the record labels are trying to mend the relationship between the audience and themselves.

It was not just the record labels who were trying to take advantage of the evolution of the internet. Soon websites like Pledgemusic, Tunited and Spotify came to light.

Tunited was built upon the fact the music industry was becoming more and more unbalanced. It is a community made website where users pay for listening to online streamed music with a pay-as-you-go system with all profits going to the music makers/artists. Tunited tends to work with smaller, independent artists unlike Vevo and We7.

Pledgemusic is slightly different. Pledgemusic is a direct fan-to-artist platform where all the music is fan-funded. The purpose of Pledgemusic is to encourage fans to speak to their favourite artists and band directly, affecting the next release they make. However, for the band able to release the next album/single, the fans literally ‘pledge’ to the bands by funding their work with donations, fundraising the next single.

Spotify on the other hand, is completely different to Pledgemusic. Pledgemusic and Tunited are both account based and browser based. Spotify is also account based, meaning you must have an account (free or subscription based) to be able to access it, as well as being a software. Spotify must be downloaded first and internet access must be available whilst using it. Spotify is a live streaming software where you can listen to music for free with advertisements in between, similar with We7 thought We7 is browser based. You can create playlists and share music with other friends who also have Spotify and they pay artists by sharing profits from advertisements. They have also introduced that; if the artists stops making music, they won’t play their music hence they won’t lose any money.

With all these new websites popping up, the audience now have a wider choice than just illegally downloading music. The appeal of being legal whilst listening to music for free is generally what is attracting all the audiences to these websites. In addition, the websites are all online streaming so the audience don’t actually own the music. This questions the fact whether the audience really need the own the music to enjoy the music.

In conclusion, the internet has completely broken up the stable relationship the audience had with institutions. However, because of this, record labels are able to use new innovative ideas to build up a better and stronger relationship that suits the current technology.