The internet takeover

With a society that lives on the internet, is the way of physical items a thing of the past?

In 1980, Song and Phillips joined together to create the first CD, this would soon overtake Vinyl and Audio Cassette, but is the overtake of a cyber-society about to throw the physical CD out the window.

When the internet first started off in 1995, we never thought that it would affect our lives the way it does today, everything is at our fingertips and with computers having hard drives that can hold mass amounts of files and data it simply makes it more convenient to hold these files on them rather than having the actual hard copies.

But in fact people have questioned if these files will still be around in 20-30 years due to everything essentially a soft copy and if this happens will we still be able to go and purchase (or download) our beloved “Greatest Hits” albums or special anniversary editions of movies?

Figures from the Australia Recording Industry Association (ARIA) have shown that each year physical cd sales have decreased year by year, while digital copies have increased.

In 2009 Cd single sales, according to the ARIA Wholesale figures report  alone reached a quantity total of 507, 268 this equal to $1,314,185 of the total sales, the following year sales dropped 94% down to 29, 174 with total sales only reaching $159,286.  

The internet has started a love hate relationship between itself and the Music Industry. With social media sites now allowing us to talk directly to our favourite bands and allowing them to respond and keep us updated with their current whereabouts and how the new album is coming along, and with sites such as YouTube and software such as Spotify helping those upcoming artists to be noticed by labels and help to create a larger fan base. But at the same time it paves the way for illegal downloading when sites such as “http://www.youtube-mp3.org/” allow users to take the URL of the video they wish to download, be movie or music, and allow them to easily download single tracks but the effect this has on the music industry and the economy is bigger than we actually seem to be realising.

Now I’m not saying that the internet is all doom and gloom for the industry YouTube has both a positive and negative effect on the music industry. Before the internet became as big as it did, Musicians would have to promote their band by using Gigs and word of mouth to become the success that they could become while the recording industries had to roam around the streets and clubs looking for their next big thing. These day recording companies can simply hop onto YouTube and search for recently uploaded videos from around the world. It makes the road to stardom easier but at a cost. As more bands upload their music to the site, the more people will find it and risk the chance of people easily downloading the music with a simple downloading tool.

Since the internet has taken off we have seen a major decline in physical music stores around the Sydney area. What use to be the excitement of waiting out the front of the record store for it to open on to get your precious copy of your favourite album just released and opening the minute your home and going through the album booklet has now been changed to simply clicking a button and waiting however long for it to be downloaded. You listen and that’s the end. No album cover. No track listing. Just an effortless robotic click after click.

In December 2011, Music store giant, HMV, announced that due to the decline of album sales about 13.6% just in the Christmas period alone, that they would be closing 40 of their major stores. This means a mass loss of jobs.

Earlier this year, one of Australia’s biggest classical music store closed due to lack of sales, Fish Records in Newtown held some one of the largest collections of classical music. While Resist Records is also finding it hard to cope, but have found by allowing other sales besides merchandise and also doing events such as band signings and surprise concerts, then they are able to at least get their name out there and keep their business alive.

Blake Tollis, an avid music lover admits “I do like to download music, it’s cheap and easy for a uni student who doesn’t have much money to spend on certain luxuries, I do like to occasionally splurge on an album or two but never anything more and not every week, it gets too expensive after a while”

While these smaller companies may not have a larger effect on the music scene as a store as big as HMV it does still impact where we are get out music from.

If our music stores keep declining, then it will leave little options for us to obtain physical copies of singles, albums and even dvd’s, meaning that internet downloading may soon be one of the only ways we are able to acquire our music.

We can also see the decline in physical sales of not only music but of book stores. Last year we saw the closure of 2 major book stores, Borders and Angus and Robertson. The closure of Angus and Robertson alone meant the loss of 102 permanent staff and 219 casual staff. But the reason being for this isn’t because of illegal downloading of books, this is because most sales of books as with most of the sales made these days has been done online. Australian book sales had only fallen 2 per cent nationwide over the first half of 2011, but the reason for any decline is due to the strong dollar which Australia currently has over the most of the Exchange, in particular America.

America has become one of Australia’s biggest competitions in the retail environment, not just the music or book industries. This is because the main source of international artists and authors come from the United States meaning that most of the time they chose to pre-release their album or book to their immediate audience before shipping over to other countries. To try to counteract this increase of overseas sales, many American companies have chosen to stop shipping online sales to Australia because of the loss of profits.

If consumers continue this current fad of digital downloading and overseas online shopping then our economy and any future of any industries are going to suffer. This is because we are giving our money to another country for their economy, if we are purchasing online, which means we are giving away any future jobs and any chance of expansion of companies which means we lose out on jobs as well as our future generations.

If we continue to download our music digitally then we face both a decline in the music industry, but a rise in prices of merchandise sales. If music is continued to be produced and downloaded digitally rather than being purchased, then this could mean to save money, that we could be saying goodbye to the physical album and/or single. If this does eventuate than we could lose many music tracks with computers crashing or other complications that may arise with computers.

So to ensure that our future is safe and preserved we should support both our local and international artists, support our companies and support our economy because otherwise, we won’t have much left to love.