Music Industry Crisis

Is your Digi pack really going to sell ? 

CD sales are falling each year. The ' product' is now bought online as a single song or album, and exists only as an item on an Ipod, mobile phone or computer.



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1970s AD                          1980s AD                       1990s AD                         Modern
8-track                             cassette                                  CD                                 MP3

In 2009 as much as 95% of the music downloaded online was done illegally. 

Most people in modern days use Spotify or  Apple Music instead of buying CDs. This is because for example on Spotify students get a discount and they could listen to any artist or band. Therefore its more convenient.

The music industry daimed a victory in 2009 when four men behind file-sharing site Pirate Bay were sentenced to a year in jail and ordering to pay 2.5 million pounds in damages for helping internet users to download music, films and computer games without paying for them.

HMV vs Itunes 

The CD goes the way of other defunct formats such as vinyls and tapes.
HMV does not want to sell CDs anymore due to the fact of hardly any sales and having a lot of store closures, even their website couldn't compete with Amazon and Itunes.

DE-COMMODIFICATION 

A commodity always depends for its status and its value on it relative scarcity; once the production and distribution of that commodity become effectively free, then it necessarily loses that value and that status.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's theory

THEORY

Adorno and Horkheimer adopted the term 'culture industry' as it produced music the same way as manufactures produced vast quantities of consumer goods . They argued that the culture industry exhibited an 'assembly line character' which could be observed in the ' synthetic, planned methods of turning out it's products. ' 

They liked the idea of ' the culture industry' to a model of 'mass culture' in which cultural production had become a routine, standardised repetitive operation that produced undemanding cultural commodities which in turn resulted in a type of consumption that was also standardised, distracted and passive.

Their view of cultural production has, with some justification, often been portrayed as the pessimistic lament of cultural Ellis's who were dismayed at what they perceived to be the homogeneity and vulgarity of 'mass' and taste.

Money makes the system go round thats why they pick stuff that is defiantly going to be liked by the population. Therefore anything new and different is rejected. Culture industry is the same as manufacturing industries. Products were maid according to rationalised organisational producers that were established for the sole purpose of making money.

STANDARDISATION 

Making a formula for something that is going to be very successful. Popular songs now have standards that need to be reached when making.
Hit songs are mechanical and manipulative operation purely by commercial going.

PSEUDO

Adorno and Horkheimer were every critical of what they refer to as pseudo individuality.The way the culture industry assembled producers that made claim to originality but which when examined more critically exhibited little more than superficial differences. 

 Lock and keys- they're all different but exactly the same. 
The whole uniqueness lies only in very minor modification.