How the music industry is changing

The music industry is very diverse, it is highly popular and has many different styles, genre, languages, artists etc. But changes in the music industry has caused a lot more consumer variety than ever before, with not only the type of music they are interested in but the artists, the album or singles, CD's, MP3's, Ipod, YouTube, downloading etc. There are many possibilities in how the consumer buys the music, as well as artists, types of music, types of style constantly growing in the industry.
The main change is the digital foramt, the main way of listening to music used to be casset/CD's, but as the years go on and technology expands the way we collect and store music has changed. A lot of people now use Ipods and download music onto their phone, a popular way of downloading songs is through Itunes, this is legal and consumers pay for the individual songs or albums. Although the growth of illegal downloading is very comman, with music producers and artists missing a lot of profit, making the music industry a lot less stable financially. This puts the artists and the producers at a struggle because with illegal downloading getting more and more popular, money being made from music is vastly declining.

Aswell as the consuming proccess changing, the distribution of the music industry is also changing with a lot more geographical distrubition of audiences of niche interests developing all over the world.

This puts the artists that i'm reasearching in a bad position because they are not signed with big names, so they are not as well known as others in the industry, so their CD sales and merchandise is not going to be as popular or as common, so a lot of consumers when hearing about their music are likely to reasearch them on the internet and YouTube instead of buying their records.