An aspect of the industry that I think is most evident today is being able to play your favorite types of music through the Internet without a cost. Most people today use sites like Youth and Pandora to listen to a specific artist or genre of music with no fee. My question is: how does an artist and record label make money from no sale of their music? On one hand, however, the publicity as an artist and the label behind the artist is a huge gain through these websites. For example, an artist like Justine
Bibber, who has almost 440 million views in total on the videos he posts on his Youth site, would not hesitate to say that the use of Internet broadcast made him the teen idol that he is today. On the other hand, there is no doubt that these music labels would need to monitor the copyrighted media in some way that the major companies could make revenue. If I was not shuffling my music on my Pod, I used to listen to my music through Youth with no commercial interruption.
Sadly, with the velveteen of Vivo, a video hosting service that does not take an ownership stake on the copyright but makes revenue through advertisements, my music felt like it was always closely monitored under one company distributing the media. It was like television all over again where there would always be an advertisement before you could get to the good stuff. Ultimately, I understand now that the music companies need to sell their limited copyrights to companies like Vivo and Pandora in order to maximize publicity by appealing to the consumers’ needs.