Music Industry

The music business is one of the few industries that has trouble growing profits in its transition to digital. The emergence of the Internet and new communication technologies has had an impact on consumers of music and the way in which music is consumed, but the industry is yet lacking the cultural capital to make a successful transition to a new business model in the information age (Freedman, 2003). The advent of digital technologies radically interrupts the nature of the Music Industry’s Traditional Value Chain, which particularly affects the music recording industry. For instance, the latest development of sales shows that global recorded music sales went down 15.4 % in 2008, which shown in Figure 1. Among the countries, the US market was seriously affected - with a decline of 31.2 % (IFPI, 2009).

Figure 1: Recorded Music Sales

The technological developments nowadays are having a significant effect on the role of the major record labels in the music industry. The most rapidly growing form of piracy to affect music sales at the present time has been the unauthorised exchange of music via the internet. Internet piracy simply involves making databases of music files available on the word-wide web for immediate download by consumers, without payment to the rightsholders whose material is being used and without their permission. Internet newsgroups and chat rooms may be involved in serial uploading or downloading of music material, and many sites have been established offering links to sources of infringing material. One of the most prominent avenues for obtaining unauthorised access to music on the internet has been via Napster, which at its height was trading some 2.8 billion songs per month. The hard work that done by the record industry to initiate the litigation against high-volume internet pirates can only able to prevent or charge a part of the internet pirates. As a result, the recording industry’s capacity to continue to exert the market power that