Ten Billionth Download: ITunes and the Music Revolution

This article, http://tiny.cc/qbBIV, talks about the soon- to- be 10 billion song countdown on ITunes, the digital music vendor for the IPod. This milestone was reached this week by the downloading of “Guess Things Happen That Way” by Johnny Cash, by Louie Sulcer of Woodstock, Georgia. The article states that it only took ITunes 5 years to blow past all the major music retailers and that 70% of global digital music sales are ITunes. By the end of 2010, the IPod should overtake the Sony Walkman as the single most popular consumer device of all time. What does this say about how we view music and how we use music in our lives? Has the music industry been put out of business?
Have digital music files – mp3s – killed the music industry? As I ponder the readings of two weeks ago regarding music literacy, I am fascinated by the rapid fire way music has changed in the past 40 years or so. A teenager in the early 70’s, most of my friends bought albums. One could also purchase 45’s, singles sold separately for a fraction of the cost, but the real money maker was the album.
Each of the innovations that have been introduced during the last few decades since then, have changed music. Vinyl records, FM radio, cassette tapes, CDs and MTV have all affected the music industry, but have not killed it. In fact, it seems to me that popular music has infiltrated our lives more with each new innovation. Everything in our society today, at least in the West, is about instant gratification and this – push a button and get the song you want instantly - is a healthy part of that. No going to the store, no asking for your album, you don’t even have to buy the whole album anymore. This has many critics saying that the music business is gone forever. I disagree. At no other time in my life has music been so prevalent in everyday life. Now that we can download music from the internet and onto mp3 players, like the IPod, popular music has exploded into advertising, TV shows and movies, as well as at the gym and in our cars.
The more easily we can get our hands on our own copy of our favorite songs, the more we listen. When the Walkman came out, and we realized we could record our favorite songs and bring them with us where ever we went, it revolutionized how we listened. Sure, we had portable radios before the Walkman – transistors – but we still had to rely on the DJs to play songs we wanted to hear. By being able to record our own, we could choose when and what we listened to.
This change in the music industry has also been good for new artists like Colbie Caillat who wrote “Bubbly”, posted it to Youtube and her career was born. Maybe instead of thinking that the music business is dead or dying, we have to re-evaluate and just admit that it is alive and well…but different. We cannot be afraid to change with the technology, in our thinking and in how we do business, or we will become obsolete.