Music and the Internet
The emergence and increased availability of the Internet has had a profound effect on music listening, distribution and even creation, in ways that we are still continuing to explore and understand.
Distribution
Just as it has with other consumer markets, the Internet has had a revolutionary effect on how people acquire and listen to music.
Digital Audio Sales
In 2003, Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, an online music retailer that sold individual tracks and albums from the major record companies at the time as MP3 audio files, as opposed to the existing consumer model of buying physical CDs. Within three years, more music in the US was purchased as digital audio downloads than in all other formats combined. Competing services by other technology companies were introduced, but thanks to its market share in the mobile music player and later smartphone markets, the iTunes Music Store remained the most popular and profitable service.
File Sharing
Unlike physical media, digital audio files introduced the possibility of making copies of music with no loss of quality, and as broadband connections became more common, it became easier to share copies of audio files over the Internet. While many independent musicians used this to share original music legally, many people also did so with commercially produced music, violating the copyrights held on that music by their respective record companies.
Some of the most popular services for file sharing in the late 1990s and early 2000s included Napster, LimeWire, and Kazaa, each of which operated as peer-to-peer file sharing systems. Rather than storing and distributing copyrighted material, which was clearly illegal, these services coordinated systems where users downloaded files directly from other users' computers. Despite this, these services were frequently the target of lawsuits by the recording industry, and many eventually ceased operations.
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As a means of discouraging illegal file sharing, record companies applied methods of copy protection in digital audio files purchased at online retailers.
Streaming Services
Despite continued efforts by the recording industry to prevent illegal file sharing, for many consumers, the convenience of downloading music illegally — along with the very low probability of being identified and punished for doing so — outweighed the cost of purchasing music legally. As a result, many people wondered if the situation would lead to a revision of the traditional system of music copyright.
Interestingly, this conflict was sidestepped by the emergence of streaming services: services in which music listeners do not purchase specific tracks or album but listen to audio files which remain stored on the service's servers. These services, which include Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora, provide access to expansive catalogs of music for a monthly subscription fee or via free limited-feature models supported by the inclusion of periodic ads. Because they provided on-demand access to most popular recorded music for little or no cost, use of file sharing decreased in the early 2010s.
YouTube
One of the oldest and most popular streaming audio services is the video sharing site YouTube, which operates primarily as an ad-supported free service. After launching in 2005 and being purchased by Google in 2006, YouTube added a feature called monetization which copyright owners to collect a portion of the ad revenue earned by views of their media. Notably, YouTube also provided a service which scanned uploaded videos for copyrighted audio and video, so copyright owners could collect revenue from videos uploaded by other people which contained their intellectual property.
This created a unique situation where users could share and access copyrighted music online with the implicit permission of copyright holders, who collected the resulting ad revenue. As a result, many users used — and continue to use — YouTube as a streaming audio service, despite it being designed for video; songs are often uploaded still images of the song's album cover or slideshows of related images, as official or fan-made music videos, or as lyric videos which display the songs lyrics during playback.
Sheet Music
Notated music has also benefitted from the Internet as a distribution tool. Previously, music publishers once required access to printing facilities and retailers to do business; independent publishers can now compete with a web-based storefront and either outsourcing printing and shipping to print-on-demand services or relying on customers to download and print purchased music.
Online music archives like the International Music Score Library Project and the Internet Archive have also been developed, giving users access to music in the public domain. Sites like Ultimate Guitar host user-submitted lead sheets and guitar tablature of popular music, providing a resource for guitarists and other musicians to learn and perform covers.
Composition and Pedagogy
The Internet has also reduced or removed barriers of entry for beginning composers and theorists by providing free resources to tools and instruction.
Compositional Tools
Most DAWs support a plug-in architecture for adding sounds, effects, and other components, and the Internet has fostered online communities for sharing these plug-ins, often for free. As hardware, software, and broadband connectivity has improved, more and more tools are being designed as web applications, software which is platform independent, accessible and often available for free. Popular tools include online DAWs like Soundtrap and online notation programs like Noteflight.
Instruction
The Internet provides a wealth of information for those who want to learn to perform, create or better appreciate music. By founding and maintaining active and popular YouTube channels devoted to music theory and appreciation, producers such as American theorists Adam Neely and Cory Arnold provide an alternative to more traditional academic studies which have helped to revolutionize how music is taught at all levels.
Collaboration
As a medium for communications, one of the Internet's most exciting and promising effects on music creation and performance is the possibility of collaborating across long geographic distances.
Asynchronous Performance
One of the first notable examples of large-scale musical collaboration was a series of performances coordinated by American composer and conductor Eric Whitacre, who solicited, collected and combined individual videos of singers from around the world into a single performance. The largest of these performances, all released under the project name Virtual Choir, involved more than 17,000 individual singers.
The video-based social media platform TikTok introduced a feature in 2008 called "Duets" which allows users to post video responses in a split-screen format, facilitating asynchronous collaboration. In 2020, a chain of Duet posts led to the impromptu creation of a musical adaptation of the 2007 Disney/Pixar film Ratatouille, leading to an online benefit concert presentation of the completed work by Broadway actors and musicians.
Synchronous Performance
Synchronous performance, where musicians are performing together in real time over the Internet, always involves a degree of latency, since signals can not move faster than the speed of light, which is about 180,000 miles per second — and are in reality limited to much slower speeds imposed intrinsically by telecommunications hardware.
Even so, emerging teleconferencing technologies like Soundjack, when used on computers with high-speed broadband connections, are able to provide an environment suitable for synchronous performance by keeping latency below 30 milliseconds, the smallest unit of time most people are able to perceive.
Music and the Internet: Summary
- The rise of the internet has had a profound effect on music distribution.
- In the early 2000s, music purchasing began to shift to digital downloads.
- Simultaneously, the simplicity and availability of illegal file sharing represented a significant challenge to the recording industry.
- Streaming services offered a subscription-based alternative that reduced music piracy.
- Thanks to its system of monetization, Youtube has been one of the most popular streaming services for audio.
- The Internet has provided a venue for sharing sheet music, audio editing software, and music instruction.
- As access to technology and broadband connectivity continues to increase, the Internet has allowed for opportunities for collaboration.
- Social media applications like TikTok provide tools for asynchronous collaboration.
- Recent improvements in teleconferencing software are reducing latency to allow for synchronous collaboration.