The New Technology of Music

The New Technology of Music

With the advancement of computer-based technology, music is being accessed and created in ways that were not seen only a few years ago. Whole catalogs of music are available on the Internet, some for a fee but most are free. Artists can create studio quality recordings at home with the help of digital technology and upload those songs to the Internet. As to be expected the recording industry has a severe distain for this advancement of musical technology simply for fear of it disturbing the companies year end bottom line. As much as the record business would like to have the public believe that computer-based music technology would forever ruin music, quit the opposite is true.

With the popularization of the MP3 format a few years back came a renewed interest into listening to music. One of the great advantages of the Internet was that it allowed for almost immediate access to information instantaneously. If a song had been recorded, then there was a good chance it could be found on the Internet. The MP3 format allowed listeners to check out new artists and allowed for people to sent songs to each other of artists they thought should be heard. This was a good way for unknown artists to be heard or forgotten artist to be re-discovered. Radio station play lists or MTV’s idea of the next big thing did not fuel this rekindled interest in music. Rather a desire to simply listen to music was all that drove this phenomenon of people downloading music.

Certainly there are detractors to the format who charge that MP3’s steal revenues off their music. While it is true that people could (and probably have) simply download entire albums of artists. That reasoning alone is not enough to condemn an entire format of music. The artists that complain the loudest of the potentially crippling album sales are the established artists who have already made a fortune in the recording business. The established artists feel it is necessary to protect there recordings, and by all means they have that right, but one argument that is brought up by these same artists is that this technology hurts up and coming artists.

The rationale behind this may a lack of record sales for the younger artists on the surface. However that argument only makes the established artist look bad as they are using unsuccessful artists lack of success to protect their own interest (money).