Essay on The Music Industry

Explore the Mechanics of the Modern Music Industry

As the music industry is one of the longest running industries of all time, it has changed and developed many times, this includes the birth of MTV in 1981, the introduction of the vinyl, video cassette, CD, cable, satellite broadcasting and the music video. The first music video broadcasted on MTV was 'Video killed the radiostar' by 'The Buggles'. Music is a popular form of entertainment that is enjoyed by many worldwide as it is categorised into genres which individuals can favour and find their own ways to express themselves.

What makes the modern music industry recognisable today alongside the artists and bands is the three major recording companies; Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and Sony Entertainment Music. In terms of market share, Universal made the most out of the three with 33.5%, Sony followed with 22.6% and Warner made 17.1% in 2015. For Sony Music Group, this was an improvement of 0.3% from 2012 (22.3%), this may have been impacted by the Female soul singer Adele with her Albym '25' which was released on the 20th November 2015. In total, 7.4 million units of 25 was sold (5 million CD units, 2.3 million digital units and 116,000 vinyl units). The amount of vinyls that were sold shows that they are making a huge comeback after being highly popular in the past, In 2013, CD sales declined by 14.5% and digital sales declined by 2%. As a result, vinyl sales increased by by 33.5% for the year. In my opinion, I believe Adele's most recent album generated high figures of sales due to marketing; the carpool karaoke with James Corden currently stands at 145 million views whilst one of her singles 'Hello' from 25 currently has 1.8 billion views and is recognised as the 7th most viewed video on YouTube.    

As time has progressed, music streaming has become a popular method of music consumption. During 2015, the UK drew up a figure of 26.8 billion however the USA had higher than the UK figure tripled with 145 billion. Similarly to the success of Adele's 'Hello' music video, her audio version was streamed 645,826,792 times on the music streaming service 'Spotify'. She is also recognised as one of the most streamed females on Spotify with 21,350,354 monthly listeners. The music streaming service 'Spotify' is free in 55 countries and also has the option of paying for a monthly subscription with benefits to students by offering a discounted price and other offers such as family packs. In comparison with Apple Music, Spotify produced a market share of revenue (40%) and subscriber share (44%) whilst Apple Music only produced 18% revenue share and 19% subscriber share globally in 2016. In my opinion, Spotify dominated 2016 in terms of streaming figures as they nearly produced 50% on both the subscriber share and revenue share. I believe this is because Spotify has had a longer running time as it launched on the 7th of October 2008 whereas Apple Music launched seven years later on the 8th of June 2015.