Online Music
Since the dawn of the internet, many physical trades have suffered, with sales being transferred onto the web. One such trade is music, where online music sales and downloads now becoming increasingly popular due to convenience and cost, with many services such as ITunes, Myspace and 7Digital offering a download service where online music consumers can purchase music legally whilst not having to commit to a whole album.
Online music is now available from a huge number of sources, both legal and illegal, and many artists now utilise this to make their music heard by as many people as possible, by either downloads or live streams. This utilisation of online music distribution has meant that in turn, sales of physically released singles and albums has fallen drastically, meaning that many record shops have struggled to stay profitable.
The use of online music has also had a negative effect on record labels, with many bands now being able to set up and distribute their own music without the need to give most of their profit away. On the other had, some bands have managed to utilise record label help to make their records sell better online. Music from artists like Gnarls Barkley has reached the top of the charts on download sales alone, proving that in the future, online music really will be the dominant form of music distribution.