Spotify and Napster

Again to further my understanding of the music industry to see what type of industry my product is becoming part of I have researched how people consume music now, especially digitally and on music streaming sites.

Spotify is a music streaming service set up in 2008 which is now available across much of europe and America. It offers a wide range of music to stream on a variety of devices such as PC's, Mac's, Ipods and Android phones. It includes music from both independent music publishers and the 'big 4' and has a free limited version, a unlimited version for £5 a month and a premium version for £10. This means that music producers now have to distribute music through others companies so loose vertical integration. Spotify also has approximately 10 million users, 2.5 million of whom pay as of 2010 which shows that it is widely used and again connotes how the industry has changed from vinyl to CD to digital in the last 30 years.

Napster is a peer online file sharing site which started in 1999 developed by John Fanning, Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. It's main emphasis when it started was the sharing of audio files for MP3 downloads but the original company ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringement. Then in 2003 it was reconfigured as a paying online store by Roxio and was later acquired by Rhapsody in 2011. It now offers a monthly subscription which offers unlimited listening to a wide range of songs for $5-7, an MP3 store and a pay-per-track store. This again shows how the industry is changing from physical copies of music to digital and online downloading.