Recording

Streaming and downloading has changed the way the music industry works and the way artists get paid. Digital music really became big through Apple's Itunes and the introduction of the IPod in 2003 (Baran, 2017, pg. 173). But since the beginning of streaming, digital downloads of music have been steadily decreasing. Digital downloads decreased 12.5% for albums and 22.3% for singles between 2019 and 2020 ("Year End Report", 2021). CD's made way for digital downloads, and digital downloads made way for streaming. 

An issue that the boom of streaming has created is giving artist a fair pay for their songs being streamed. On Spotify (the most popular streaming service), an artist makes $0.003 per stream (which is around $3000 per 1 million streams). This is compared to when cd's were the most popular medium, at which they sold for around $30, and each artist got around 10% of the sale (Brian, n.d.). So they would make around $3 per sale. This was an actual reasonable way for artists to make a living back then. Now since streaming and downloading are so accessable it is so much cheaper, so it really is not possible to make a living off of streams. 

Streaming and downloading has also made it much easier to pirate music. Music piracy is "the illegal recording and sale of copyrighted material and high quality recordings" (Baran, 2017). Because these recordings are so easily accessable, it was so much easier for people to illegally sell other's art. Even though many new laws have been created trying to battle piracy, the music industry claims that they lose billions each year to it (Baran, 2017). 

In the 2020's, it has been found that many artists become famous or have big songs because of social media. One of the biggest social media platforms that artists market their songs on is TikTok. One of the biggest example of the impact of social media marketing is the song Old Town Road  by Lil Nas X. This was the most streamed song of 2020. The artist, Lil Nas X, leased a beat from an online sample market called BeatStars for $30, spent $20 to record in a studio, and then released the song to Tiktok where it blew up and obviously became the most popular song of 2020. Because the song blew up on Tiktok, it got Lil Nas X 2.4 billion audio and video streams, and a major label contract with Universal (Baran, 2017). This example really shows the impact that social media marketing can have on music and the industry in general. Some other examples TikTok helping the success of songs are songs with TikTok dances. What happens is, TikTok creators make up dances (or are asked to make up dances by the artist) and then other people with keep recreating the dance, giving the song streams, as well as encouraging TikTok users to listen to the song. A specific example of this is when the artist Drake asked a TikTok dancer to create a dance to his song "Tootsie Slide". Because people were recreating the dance and streaming the song, the song went number one on the Billboard singles chart (Baran, 2017).