Featured Post

QAnon: The Q-Sort Personality Profile Builder

Gettin Billy with It QAnon is based on Q-Sort: A psychological technique of which there are many variations, resulting in 50 descript...

Monday, January 26, 2015

Is the Free Digital Music Era Finally Coming to a Close?

This post from November got caught in the Drafts file. It notes that Yahoo! Finance reported industry experts forecasting the end of the "era of free  music." One leader called it 'a mistake, in hindsight.' Experts expected most major labels and services to start charging a fee without access to free play, such as Last.FM.

I admit to not being a regular user of any music shuffling services aside from the occasional listen to Pandora. Last.FM kind of soured me, as have many of the independent media programs I've been introduced to over the years. As such, I cannot say what other services do or do not, nor if their prices have increased but I thought the information following the soaring rate of vinyl sales in 2014 indicated that pay music was back, for now. Still, overall sales of music is down across the boards.

Of course the Internet is going to transmit or broadcast - that's what it was always supposed to do! Certain influences have simply used their affluence to keep things way, far back in the telephone age for most Americans. We pay twice as much for half as many services and bandwidth and Internet "radio" as we know it is going all-premium? I don't really see that happening although I agree that musicians and others involved in the actual making of the music should be granted more of the sales and hits their work generates.

Copyright 2015, The Cyberculturalist

No comments: