Music Industry And The Internet Essay Research

Music Industry And The Internet Essay, Research Paper

Music has for a long time been a big part of American traditions and pastimes. But many don’t really know what goes into the making of the songs, besides the lyrics and the music. Most of the public puts little thought into how a Cd is really produced, shipped, and presented to the public, or about the costs of producing a record compared to the profits made by corporations. Technology also plays an important role in music, and makes it easily available to everyone around the world. But does it effect us. Should we have to care how a record company is run. Yes, in many ways it can, and does. Prices and advertising have strong effects on the demand to purchase goods. (Chapple, 238) It can effect the purchaser, and the seller in many ways, and there are positive and negative effects to this system.In the early days, music was just as competitive as today, in all aspects. As technology grew, so did everyones spirits to come out with the “next-best thing”. According to MediaHistory.com, here is a timeline of a few advances made in music:1877 – Edison made the first recording of a human voice (”Mary had a little lamb”) on the first tinfoil cylinder phonograph.1878- Edison granted patent 200,521 on Feb. 19 for a phonograph using cylinders wrapped with tin foil with 2-3 min. capacity 1881 – Charles Tainter at the Volta Lab made the first lateral-cut records, but without any practical machine to play them back. 1885 – A second type of phonograph was invented by Chichester Bell and Charles Tainter; they were granted patent 341,214 on a machine that they called the “Graphophone” using wax-coated cylinders incised with vertical-cut grooves.1888 – Emile Berliner demonstrated an improved gramophone May 16 at the Franklin Institute using a flat 7-inch disk with lateral-cut grooves on one side only, manually rotated at 30 rpm with 2-min. capacity; Berliner is the first to mass-produce hard rubber vulcanite copies from zinc master disk. 1890 – The first “juke box” was the coin-operated cylinder phonograph with 4 listening tubes that earned over $1000 in its first 6 months of operation starting the previous November 23 in San Francisco’s Palais Royal Saloon, setting off a boom in popularity for commercial nickel phonographs that kept the industry alive during the Depression Nineties.1894 – in December, Guglielmo Marconi made radio history when at the age of 20 he invented his spark transmitter with antenna at his home in Bologna, Italy. He took his “Black Box” to Britain in Feb. 1896 and although it was broken by custom officials, he filed for British Patent number 12039 on June 2, 1896, and began to build a world empire of Marconi companies.1898 – Valdemar Poulsen patented in Denmark on Dec. 1 the first magnetic recorder, called the “telegraphone,” using steel wire; he exhibited his device at the Paris Exposition in 1900 and formed the American Telegraphone Co. in Nov. 1903 after Congress validated his American patent 661,619. 1906 – Columbia announced in July the Velvet-Tone thin and flexible laminated shellac record with paper core, following the proposal of Marconi who had visited the Bridgeport plant of the American Graphophone Company. This record had less surface noise than regular shellac records. 1911 – Edwin S. Pridham and Peter L. Jensen in Napa, California, invented a moving-coil loudspeaker they called the “Magnavox” that was used by Woodrow Wilson in San Diego in 1919. 1914 – ASCAP founded to enforce 1909 Copyright Act. Today, the music business is still run the same way, with profits in mind. One main way music is seen by the public is the internet. Either by shopping or downloading, music can be brought to the homes of anyone with a computer. Quickly, music of any sort can be downloaded, often for free. This is done by technologies that make it possible to change sound into digital formats that are easily saved in computer files. This is done by compressing files to about one-tenth of their regular size. Later these are used to create the MPEG 1-Audio Layer 3 format, or the MP3. These are then downloaded off the web onto personal computers. Since they now take up so little space, these songs are easily transmited over the internet and, in turn, can then be “burned onto compact discs, or broadcasts on Internet-based radio stations.” Music can even be traded among friends through e-mail, or “peer to peer” file sharing programs. (Music & Internet, 321) Some believe this is just a way of people “stealing” music, and not having to pay for it. It is said that these big companies are losing money due to such webites as Napster, Scour.com, Gnutella, and MP3.com, which are downloaded free, and allow users to scan millions of PC’s or main computers and locate sound and music files containing songs or albums they would like to download. Others believe that these sites have thrown major companies into financial jeopardy due to “computer-literate pirates.” (Music & Internet, 321) Many are just afraid this will hurt record sales, because many will just download music from the internet, and deprive those in the recording companies of their revenues. In May 2000, a study was done by Reciprocal Inc., a company that studies the distribution of online content, which showed that even though music sales are steadily rising, sales in record stores near college campuses have had a drop in business by 4% during the first 3 months in 1998, as overal