Research - Summary Of the music industry now

The music industry is owned by the 'Big 4'. Four big labels that own smaller labels that focus on certain genres. For e.g Universal own Def Jam and they focus on hip hop/rap. Universal also own Uni Music Latino which focus on Latino.

The Big 4 are: Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Group, Warner Music Group

The Big 4 however do not just deal with music. They are conglomerates. For e.g. Universal also makes films, Sony also makes products (tv, computers),  EMI also makes films & Time Warner own AOL the internet service

However the current situation for  the music industry is bad. Sales for albums has dropped over £100 million in 2 years

• 2010 - 319m
• 2009 - 366m
• 2008 - 428m

On the other hand sales for digital singles and albums have gone up

• 2010 - 160m digital singles
• 2009 - 149.7m digital singles
• 2010 - 21m digital albums
• 2009 - 16.1m digital albums

This is proof of the shift in consumers behaviour. We now consume music from Internet and web 2.0 soon web 3.0 also we buy more singles than whole albums. We choose our favourite track without listening to the rest of the artist music

Current trends to consume music

• 67 legal downloading services are in the UK alone
• Itunes & amazon are the most popular and most cheap
• 3/4 of all downloaded music in UK is illegal
• 1.2 billion illegal downloads in the UK in 2010
• Streaming allows music to be delivered to a user on demand e.g. Youtube

Other possible sources

• Facebook will soon offer a music streaming/file sharing service
• Google plus to offer similar services
• Artist's websites
• Independent Artist can sell their music on own websites