The Collapse Of The Phonography Industry In The 1920's

At the end of the 1920s, the market acquired considerable dimensions : sales of phonographs amounted to around 2 million units and record sales in the United States alone amounted to 140 million copies (Geoffrey P.Hull, Thomas Hutchinson, Richard Strasser, 2004).

In 1929, however, in the United States, the Great Depression gave rise to an economic crisis and the industry suffered a big collapse. Its downhill was also due to the introduction of radio and sound cinema, which changed the needs of customers who are now more oriented to consume those kind of goods in their free time. Record industries were afraid people would just listen to music from the radio for free, without buying records. This concern was proved to be true when sales of recordings in the US went from 104 million in 1929 to 6 million units in 1932 and sales of phonographs decreased to just 40,000 units a year (Frith, 1988). The most obvious consequence of this drop in sales was the collapse of the small phonographic companies that had developed during the phonograph boom in the 1920s. The offer is now concentrated in an oligopoly,

Its discovery allowed two American computer scientists, Shawn fanning and Sean Parker, to create a network that could share entire musical repertoires for free to its users, bypassing the law and copyright : Napster. This opened the door for music piracy and MP3 soon became a regular format for the consumption of music. In just two years, millions of files were shared and millions of copyright violations were made. For this reason the RIAA (Recording Association of America), the association that groups the most important American record companies, officially cites Napster in court in San Francisco. At the end of the trial in September 2001 it was ordered to immediately cease the activity carried out by Napster and a compensation of 26 million dollars to the record labels was