Rise And Fall Of The Music Industry

In these last couple of years, the music industry has lost a significant amount of sales, which has caused numerous professional studios to close down and lower their prices. This is partly due because the number of home studios currently built is rapidly increasing. Recording equipment is affordable enough for a person to create a home studio and provide high quality CDs. These people can also distribute their own song by cutting the middleman and selling the songs themselves with help from online websites such as CD Baby or Sound Click. This has cut into the profit margin of many labels. However, the primary reason is that the digital era has overwhelmed the physical CD world. There is a slow but steady transition from physical CD to digital media. Consumers are buying more songs online then actual physical CDs. In 2007, 80% of record sales was from physical CDs and the remaining 20% was from digital downloads. In 2009, 64% of record sales were from physical CDs and the remaining 36% was from digital downloads. As you can see, the trend of digital downloads keeps rising. This has forced record labels to promote, distribute, and sell from what they are used to in the physical records realm. The music industry is slowly changing into the digital realm. There is a lot of material to capitalize on, but as of now, nobody has come up with a way to do this. The closest thing we have seen is iTunes, which is the biggest online music distributer. One of the areas, which is improving the music industry and is currently growing in numbers and sales, is concerts. It’s not that more people are going to concerts; it is however that people are paying more to get into concerts. The reason for this may be that concerts and live productions have improved tremendously. The growing income from live performance 
has compensated losses from the dying sale of CD’s. 

Sources

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/10/090810fa_fact_seabrook

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118021441?refCatId=16

http://www.jamesehearn.com/media/Threats-To-Studio-Survivability.pdf

Julian Treasure: The 4 ways sound affects us

The speaker I choose from the TED speakers was Julian Treasure. He shared his knowledge through his speech by explaining how sound affects everything we do on a day-to-day basis. He explained that sound is divided into four different groups that effects us differently. The first one is physiological that affects our breathing, heart rate and brain waves. The second one is psychological which affects our emotional state. The third one is cognitive which affects our productivity. Finally, the fourth one is behaviorally, which tells us actions to take. He explained based on these four groups of sound that you can design a plan on how to attract or accomplish a goal with a specific brand to attract people. He goes on to explain that music is the most powerful sound in the planet because you are able to recognize and associate it faster then any other type of sound. This speech caught my attention immediately and helped me better understand sound. I can benefit from this topic tremendously since my passion revolves around sound. Using these four groups I now understand what sounds affect people and how. I am now able to use sound to control people subconsciously. This knowledge will help me tremendously when I create products for my clients. When I create music, I can add sounds into the work to influence the listeners and attract them. I believe there is a key in this research of the four groups of sound that could help engineers bring popularity to their work. This speech also reinforced the thought that music is not going to go anywhere since it the most powerful form of sound. The music industry is suffering in some aspects, but I believe there is a new way to go around this and prosper. Music is a constant evolving sound that drives human beings and I want to capitalize on it as much as possible.


Source
http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_the_4_ways_sound_affects_us.html