music industry

49 year ago, the #1 single in America was "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" by the Shirelles, the first single to top the charts by an All-Girls group. It was co-written by an 18-year-old Carole King in the famous Brill Building and was her first hit.





The current #1 record in America is independently distributed, which means a guy in an Astro Van goes around and delivers it to "record stores". A dozen other "independent" records have topped the charts. The best selling album of last decade was by a band that broke up in 1970, The Beatles. 10 years ago I had to do a "History Day" project for school on the subject of "inventions that changed the world". I chose Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing. Without Napster, it's unlikely the mp3 player would have viable, the iPod would have released, or the iTunes store would have been created. The History Day judges didn't select my project to move on to the regional competition.



Now read this December 18th Article from Variety by Christopher Morris: Music sales took a hit: Piracy, technology send sales model back to the '50s ...

Someone teleported through time from the early 1950s to 2009 would find a music business curiously similar to the landscape of 60 years ago... Department stores (Walmart, Target) dominating the market. A singles-driven industry. Pop music dominating radio. TV musical talent shows all the rage.

But as the '00s dawned, a Pandora's box opened when computer-savvy college student Shawn Fanning's website Napster allowed users to share compressed MP3 music files -- at no charge. Napster was eventually knocked down by the courts (and absorbed by a major label), but other illegal Internet file-sharing services sprang up to replace it.
...
Labels had snuffed the physical single in the '90s... Consumers, who had long believed CDs were overpriced and packed with filler, embraced the MP3 -- either legally or illegally -- as the "new single."

Within a year of opening in 2003, the iTunes store sold 100-million tracks.
I think my position from a decade ago was vindicated.