A great discord is running through the music industry at the moment. Sales of albums are way down which means that revenue is at an all time low and this is panicking many of the big wigs who would like to protect their best interests.

In previous articles, I have discussed the way in which streaming services are adapting following backlash from artists who believe they should be paid more for their music and that it shouldn’t be available for free from advert funded streaming services.

The industry may want to blame everything on streaming, and that does seem to be the main target of their anger at the moment but the decline of album sales isn’t a sudden occurrence and it certainly isn’t the main reason.

In the early 2000s, music piracy became easy for the masses to partake in without any real thought of the consequences. Prior to that, you either had to record songs off the radio whilst poised to stop recording before the DJ spoke and ruined everything, or you had to buy copied cassettes from Dave down the market. The Internet becoming widely available to the masses changed all that, allowing music fans to easily download songs for free and create their own compilations. The best thing about this was that they could do it for free, if they knew the right sites to go to.

This signalled the beginning of the decline in album sales and this was true until the industry fought back with music superstores such as iTunes which helped make downloading legally much more attractive until the mere idea of downloading music for free became socially inacceptable.

The newest threat to the industry is the rise of music streaming. Think about it; with services such as Spotify which allow you to save playlists and listen to them anywhere and on any device, why would you ever need to physically buy an album?

This is the main reason that the industry is creating a backlash against ad-supported services. The revenue that they generate in comparison with if someone went and bought an album is negligible and so the industry wants to create a situation where there is no longer a free option, forcing consumers to pay if they want to continue streaming music.

This would be great for the industry and they of course do need to do something in order to protect their future but this embargo on free services would, in an ideal situation for the industry, extend to sites such as YouTube and the effects of that would be felt by every Internet using person on the planet.

Targeting free services so ruthlessly will inevitably lead to an increase in piracy once again, something that the industry has fought hard against over the years. This will only damage sales even further and take the music industry even further into depression.