The future of music

I have to say that I am a big music fan and have been so for as long as I can remember. For me music is a natural part in my everyday life, it can make me feel joyful, happy, sad, relaxed, and so the list of emotions keeps on going. Although I have to admit that I have never been a regular buyer of tapes or CDs. I have always listened to the music that for example friends has recommended or songs played on the radio, but very seldom actually gone out to buy them myself. As probably most of my fellow classmates I now download music every now and then which has broaden my view of music. Now I can find a lot of smaller unknown artists that I never would have found earlier, also I find myself going to a lot more concerts than before. So you can say that the creators, performers and record companies are making more money on me, as a consumer, now then they did before. But I realize that far from every consumer are like me and although sales of legal digital music are growing they are not rising fast enough to offset falling sales of CDs, partly because of internet piracy.


(Economist.com; Qualms with music)

But actually I don’t think there will be such a huge change in the music industry in the next ten years. Probably they will come up with some better solutions for legal downloading but there will still be hard to try to stop people from illegal downloads. The young people of today are used to get music for free and I think it will demand something groundbreaking to make them change their behaviour. Why pay for something when you can get it for free? That is an opinion that I recently learned is more widespread than I thought. According to a survey made in Sweden with people from the age of 16 to 65 years old, one out of four people don’t consider downloading as illegal at all. (Dagens Nyheter; Ökad tolerans för illegal nedladdning) That was a bit chocking for me to realize that even the older consumers had pretty much the same attitude. This implies that illegal downloading isn’t an issue that people consider morally wrong and that is the barrier that the music industry need to overcome in the next ten years.