The online revolution has proved as damaging to independent labels as to multinational companies. How far do you agree?

The 'online revolution' is a term that describes the modern day use of the internet to do many things that were previously restricted. In terms of the music indusry, the online revolution refers to the fact that people now have the ability to create and share music across the web. There are many bonuses to this revolution for the music industry. Since the internet became a staple part of peoples lives, programs such as iTunes and Spotify have made major profits by offering the ability to stream and download music from the internet for a nominal fee. Just as the CD revolutionised the tape recorder, and the television with the radio. The internet has revolutionised the way the music industry now operates.

However the downside to all this 'new found availability' is that music can now be obtained illegally through illegal hosting and download sites that share musical content for free. This may not sound like such a bad thing given the fact that an iTunes download costs just 89p, yet it is the modern day equivalent of walking into a shop and stealing a cd from the shelf. The music industry has a growing dependance on the internet, this isn't a major blow to major multi-national companies such as UMG as they can afford the nominal losses made by illegal downloads. This is due to their ability to regain revenue from tours and other media appearances.

For independant and small budget labels such as Domino Records, the majority of their revenue is made through album sales, therefore this new trend of downloading music for free is putting their businesses at risk, since they have no other way of gaining revenue.

Overall i would say that the online revolution has for the majority harmed the music industry by facing it with problems that had not been seen previously on such a large scale (an estimated 7 billion is lost from illegal downloads, an equivlent of 700 million cds). For multi-national companies it does represent a huge loss of earning, yet due to the size of the 'big four' each can afford to make up the revenue in other areas. Yet for independant labels such as Domino the loss of revenue is so substantial that it is crippling the independants, this loss of revenue is slowly but surely forcing them out of business.