iTunes: Good or Bad; for the Consumer, the Artist, and the Industry
By: Douglas Valeri
Per. B
Music has been a staple of culture and society for thousands of years. However, the music industry has only developed into what it is today in the last century. It has become a multi-billion dollar industry and a pop culture staple. The industry has gone through the biggest resolution in its relatively short lifespan; the digital revolution. The tyrant leading the way in the figurative war is the music super power, iTunes. This shift will not only affect the way that we listen to music, but also effect the way we watch TV, rent movies, and read books. Although iTunes is affordable convenient, expansive in choice, and helpful for struggling amateur artists; many critics thing iTunes is hurting the record business by supporting only their product, unfair to the rights of artists, and is limited into the music selections because of the abuse of artists’ rights.
The Apple program, iTunes, has always been out to help the consumer keep money in his or her pocket. From the beginning, “iTunes sold over 1m [million] downloads [in its first week]. By the end of October it had sold about 14m [million]” (The Economist 59). The article shoed how iTunes’ 99 cent idea was able to catch on quickly and not only benefit the consumer, but also the business as well. However, is this situation a match made in heaven? Along with these promising figures, iTunes was able to lead the industry into an affordable digital revolution: “Digital downloads grew 38 percent from 2006 to 2007 to become a $1.26 billion business, making up 23 percent of the market for recorded music” (Nakashima, America’s Intelligence). These numbers mean a while new outlet for the record industry, and the price is right for most regular consumers.
iTunes has been able to revolutionize the way that people listen, buy, and catalogue music. From humble beginning s of music there had been a great interest in portable music. In a study of the music industry, Marc Huygens evaluated how portable music expanded when it first started; “in 1929, more than 150 million records were sold in the United States, an increase of 50 percent over the 1921 figure” (Huygens, Co-evolution). These figures reveal that there was a market for music that could be transported practically anywhere. With the creation of the CD ten later, iTunes, the idea was changed once again to the idea of having music anywhere at anytime. According to the reporter Ryan Nakashima, a digital business writer, iTunes is doing better with their portable music than CDs did at their start: “Digital downloads grew 38 percent from 2006 to 2007 to become a 1.26 billion dollar business, making up 23 percent of the market for recorded music” (Nakashima, American Intelligence). The point-and-click music buying power has revolutionized the industry. This also adds more choices. Instead of having to by a whole CD, the listeners can pick their favorite songs from that CD to by. iTunes tries to save the buyer time and money, while giving the artist a better way to reach his or her listeners.
Artists have also gained some benefits from iTunes. They can easily reach out to their fans using the iTunes program, offering pre-sales and special bonus tracks. With these new tracks added to the CD’s, people are more likely to dish out the extra cash to listen to their favorite artists even more. Along with that, iTunes offers the song of the week. This is a great way for up-and-coming artists to donate one of their songs for free to help jump start some sales. A Recent article was also able to promote iTunes pro-indie status. The digital magazine Business Wire reported some of the partner sites that are trying to help up and coming artists break into the industry through iTunes: "By submitting their music via TuneCore, independent or established musicians can sell their music in all the major online stores and leading subscription services [including] iTunes" (Business Wire). iTunes does want to help the artist but to an extent.
The iTunes library is expansive. Name any song in the history of music and most likely iTunes will be able to find/sell it to the masses, from Amadeus Mozart to ZZ Top and everything in between. When iTunes started, they had the basics, and listeners could choose from anything they could but in a regular retail store. Now, iTunes caters even to the most obscure indie band. Along with this expansive eclectic library of music, they allow other things to be bought, such as TV episodes and movies. Customers also have the option to rent the movies as well, eliminating the everyday corner video store. John Boudreau of the San Jose Mercury News was one of the first to report about iTunes venturing into the video media realms while interviewing Phil Leigh: “Ultimately, our televisions will be hooked to the internet. We are going to pull up the iTunes page and get what we want on demand. Some of it will be free, some of it we will have to pay for” (Boudreau, San Jose). The reasons that iTunes is great for the music community (and ultimately the entertainment industry all together) goes on and on. However, there are some really big problems that make the rest of this program detrimental to the pop-culture aura in the music sales industry.
In the music industry, the musician doesn’t really make a lot of money off the actual music itself. Most of the money that an artist makes comes from concert sales, and t-shirt sales at the concerts. However, the music does give them a small (which is actually not small at all) percent of the total revenue gained by a CD. This is called a royalty. Recently, a European business magazine reported, "A panel of US judges has decided to freeze the amount of royalties paid to songwriters for tracks downloaded from the internet" (European Intelligence). CDs were priced at a certain price so that everyone got a piece of the pie including artists, managers, producers, record labels, and others. All of these people had to split $13.99 a CD. Multiplying a CD by a couple million and it adds up to a good portion per group.
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16 years ago
