iTunes, a key player in the paradigm shift in music consumption

It is an interesting exercise to perform because this Saturday, it will be 15 years to the day that Apple launched its iTunes platform. It did this just when the music industry's sales were starting to fall after the golden decade of the '90s, with huge profits generated by the transition from LPs and cassettes to CDs.

The power of digitization

But, as Roger Martínez Sanmartí, lecturer at the UOC's Faculty of Arts and Humanities, explains, "with the change of millennium, digitization, compression and broadband Internet shattered this business model, effectively turning the music industry on its head. Since the launch of Napster in 1999, the industry has been caught up in a whirlwind of continual change."

iTunes: A new model that didn't break with the past

Steve Jobs' company launched iTunes as a product to be run on its computer. Later, with the launch of the iPod, more features would be added, with a bigger catalogue and more products. According to Martínez Sanmartí, "iTunes created a format that was new and old at the same time: new because it offered the possibility of buying individual songs at a dollar each and eliminated the traditional physical medium, the CD or vinyl record". But also old because "it kept a price similar to the CDs and also perpetuated the idea of buying and owning music files, in other words, music was still something to be possessed and stored, even if it was now on the computer".

The enormous success of the iPod, and later of the iPhone and iPad, their usability, a clear price structure and the agreements signed with major record companies such as EMI, Universal, Warner Bros., Sony Music Entertainment and BMG to build an attractive catalogue, did the rest. When it was launched, the catalogue had 200,000 songs. Today, the number of titles is counted by the million, it has diversified to series and films, and it has generated a new app-based economy. So successful has it been that with a 60% market share in legal downloads, many people consider that it has a virtual monopoly.

A paradigm shift

But the change in music consumption can only be fully understood within a complete ecosystem of which iTunes is just one part: we are referring to services that already existed or which would appear later on, such as YouTube, MySpace, Last FM, Deezer, Grooveshark, Pandora or Xbox Music, with the added possibility of swapping files.

The availability of these services has triggered a paradigm shift that Martínez Sanmartí analyses as follows: "Today, as Mary Madden said in 2013 in The State of Music Online: Ten Years After Napster, any music consumer expects music to have a zero cost, or at least, close to zero; to be portable to any device; to be mobile, with wireless access; to be able to listen to any song that has ever been recorded; and to be able to freely use and mix the music he or she listens to."

From "having" to "accessing": the transition from iTunes to Spotify

And from the ownership and storage of music offered by iTunes, we now have the other great model of our time, that proposed by Spotify: access to music on the cloud. According to the UOC lecturer, Spotify goes one step beyond iTunes because "it is not based on owning the music, which perpetuates the mindset of the music consumer of the '90s who collects music to have it in his or her physical possession, but instead focuses on access and connectivity: music is not 'downloaded' or 'bought', it is 'accessed'".

The role of the industry

The industry has been very slow to react to all these changes and has lost millions of dollars on the way. It has wasted years in legal battles and criminalizing file swapping between private individuals or downloads. And during all these years, it has not made any effort to find an alternative business model to selling music recorded on physical media. Those who have found such a model, albeit partially, are companies operating outside of the music industry, such as Apple, Google or Spotify.

But the debate goes much further than that. According to Martínez Sanmartí, "the fact that the industry has chosen to criminalize consumers instead of fostering a moral connection between creators and their audiences has totally distorted the debate about access to music and the rationale of any intellectual property law, which is not just to reward the authors (or the industry) but also to strike a fair balance between protection for creators and another protection, that of the public's right to access cultural creations".

How our experience of music consumption has changed

Martínez Sanmartí highlights four particularly significant changes in contemporary music consumption: "the apparent dematerialization of music consumption; we no longer identify with the time we bought a record, we just listen; the disappearance of the fixation on objects because there are no objects, just players; the transformation of the role of music categories and units, because we no longer see the record as a unit nor music genres as watertight compartments: the listening experience is more promiscuous and fragmented". The expert also considers that there is a "different awareness of time and space; with a couple of clicks, we can access music of today and yesterday, made anywhere in the world, without having to move people or objects from one place to another, just bits".

Lastly, an impact is also observed on the tension between mainstream and peripheral alternatives: paradoxically, the gulf between mainstream and minority artists, in spite of the ease of access to all types of music, not just the most commercial types, has not narrowed. On the contrary, it is widening. With the enormous drop in revenues for the industry, "we see that independent artists are finding it much harder today than a few years ago to earn a living from selling music," he concludes.