ABSTRACT
The impact of the Internet on music distribution is more significant than any technological change in the music industry since the advent of music recording in the late nineteenth century. The Internet was designed to allow people to communicate data to one another and this is precisely what occurs with file transfer systems. The Internet has been open to commercial interest sine the mid-1990s but the widespread availability of broadband Internet connections and the efficient compression of audio files by MP3 and similar codecs has made the downloading of files as large as audio files, a viable activity for a large number of people. The distribution of musical scores in electronic form is also significant but, because of the much smaller market, is less often in the public consciousness. If we follow this trajectory, then video downloads or streaming services such as YouTube, which involve even larger file sizes may, in the future, challenge broadcast TV in the same way that streamed music is an alternative to terrestrial radio and music downloads have challenged retail CD sales. Another factor in music distribution has been the ability for people to listen to music more conveniently when they are mobile. The popularity of mobile music was first demonstrated by portable radios and the popularity of radios and music players in cars. It was reinforced again by the success of Sony’s Walkman portable cassette players and the portable CD players that replaced them, and has been evident in the early part of the twenty-first century in the popularity of digital music players such as Apple’s iPod.
