Steve Jobs was absolutely right when, during his introduction of iTunes in 2003, he excoriated software like Napster for its unpredictable transfer speed, lack of metadata, and mystery files. I did not realize that the song was over seven minutes long it took over an hour to complete the seven megabyte transfer during which time, I might add, nobody in my household could use the telephone. I had dial-up at home, but that did not stop me from trying to acquire Rob Dougan’s “Clubbed to Death” as featured on the soundtrack for the “Matrix”.

In a story straight out of that era, my first memory of Napster was in the basement of a friend’s house, watching him download a copy of Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady” over his cable internet connection. The internet and the widely-used MP3 file format certainly made it easier to facilitate copying, but it wasn’t until the creation of Napster in 1999 that it became easy - user friendly, one might say. was a response to a rise in sales of blank cassette tapes in the 1980s, a decade which also saw British music sales grow by 270%. The “ Home Taping Is Killing Music” campaign in the U.K. The battle against unauthorized duplication is effectively as old as the ability to make audio recordings, but it predictably ramped up as equipment and techniques became widespread. Ironically, the world’s greatest libraries of digital music were created by loose groups of thieves and pirates.Īnd it all started with a pig-themed website - but I will get back to that. In fact, the most clear lineage can be traced back to websites that were repeatedly accused of destroying the possibility of artists making a living. It is remarkable, isn’t it? But paid streaming services are not the product of record industry brilliance. Almost nobody was spending over a hundred dollars a year on music, but streaming services today have convinced millions of people to spend ten bucks a month for a seemingly infinite selection. sales were still delivered in the form of a compact disc - and they were generating only a quarter of the revenue they did ten years prior. The iTunes Store may have been seven years old by that point, but nearly half of U.S. In music industry terms, then, 2010 is a lifetime ago. and, for the first time, consumed over half of all spending in the country. In 2019, paid subscriptions brought in nearly $6 billion dollars in the U.S. sales - just three percent of all sales that year. In 2010, subscription services represented a little over $212 million in U.S. The upward slope of the chart is almost entirely due to streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music. Music industry revenues in 2019 tell a story of something like a comeback. Streaming Follows a Trail Paved by Thieves and Pirates

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