Blog 1 Contemporary Development In The Music

 Introduction 

Hello there, my name is Aaron Lewis. 

Welcome to my short but hopefully interesting string of blogs that I’m going to post for my ‘new business of music’ module. My blogs will provide a forum where we will explore the contemporary developments of the music industry. I will provide debating points on the topics of choice; keying in the benefits, the negative repercussions, how it’s affecting artists, musicians, companies, live performance, the industry income, steaming revenue and more. I will provide evidence to back everything up (just so you know I’m not lying). Within this, I will discuss and debate the perspectives of professionals and explore the controversy surrounding the topic, potentially injecting personal views. In this blog I'm going to involve my personal experience working in the modern music industry to keep reality flowing through this. I’ll use primary and secondary resources for this as well. Hope you guys like this and I'm on the right track.

Deciding on a topic

When approaching this, my main problem was finding the right topic. I didn’t want to sound cliche by talking about the tidal wave effect covid has had on the music industry and how it’s nearly abolished live performances. This being a problem because live performance is a main source of income for artists and musicians. I didn’t want to talk about how streaming services are taking over music output sales growing from 26.3% in 2010, to a crazy 77.5% in 2019. Consequently, we have seen the decline in CD, DVD, cassette tape sales and even vinyl, even though as of recently vinyl has been making a sudden comeback. Additionally, Artists only receive 12% of the $20billion+ that the music industry has generated worldwide in 2020 alone. But like I said before; I'm not going to write about this. [Wikipedia ‘Digital audio Workshops’ 2017 ] [Statista Oct 16th 2020] 

I've decided that my topic will be about the impact of DAW'S, plugins, and VSTs and their effect on the industry. I want to explore how auto-tune and quantising have changed the sound of music forever, enhancing vocalists by digital editing. I'll be debating whether virtual synthesisers and instruments are replacing musicians and manufacturing companies for music equipment due to convenience when recording. This would especially apply to this year since COVID has restricted people from meeting with others to collab and work together, or rent studios. [Rollingstone 7st August 2018] [New Business Worldwide May 4th 2020] 

Bibliography

• En.wikipedia.org. 2017. Digital Audio Workstation. [online] Available at: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_audio_workstation> [Accessed 3 January 2021].

• Statista. 2020. Topic: Music Industry In The United Kingdom (UK). [online] Available at: <https://www.statista.com/topics/3152/music-industry-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/> [Accessed 16 October 2020].

• Wang, A., 2018. Musicians Get Only 12 Percent Of The Money The Music Industry Makes. [online] Rolling Stone. Available at: <https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/music-artists-make-12-percent-from-music-sales-706746/> [Accessed 7 August 2018].

• Ingham, T., 2020. Global Recorded Music Industry Revenues Topped $20Bn Last Year – But Streaming Growth Slowed - Music Business Worldwide. [online] Music Business Worldwide. Available at: <https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/the-global-recorded-music-industry-generated-over-20bn-last-year-but-streaming-growth-slowed/#:~:text=Magazines-,Global%20recorded%20music%20industry%20revenues%20topped%20%2420,year%20%E2%80%93%20but%20streaming%20growth%20slowed&text=The%20global%20recorded%20music%20industry,labels%20and%20artists%20%E2%80%93%20in%202019.> [Accessed 4 May 2020].

Written by Aaron Lewis