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Castle Made Of Sand : America 's Recording Industry

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Castle Made of Sand: America’s Recording Industry In recent decades, the music industry as a whole has undergone transformative change. From the introduction of the compact disc, to the rise of iTunes and digital downloads, to the current emergence of streaming services, the way that artists produce music and deliver it to consumers has been radically altered in the past 20 years. As record labels’ stranglehold on the talent search and product distribution side of the music industry subsides, streaming services such as Spotify and Soundcloud have become the preeminent distributors of new music. Their emergence has had a negative financial impact on the artists that drive an industry that has for years been one of America’s largest. Services like Spotify and Soundcloud are erasing the role of record labels in the distribution process, assuming that role themselves while paying small royalty fees to artists and labels for the right to stream to large subscriber bases that typically make use of free memberships. Due to the small number of paid subscribers accessing these services, industry revenue has dropped below $7 billion per year for the first time since record keeping began in 1973 (Seidenberg/Podgers). However, record labels are beginning to reach agreements with these services, ensuring that the labels themselves will continue to profit, and leaving the musician to suffer. And while these services do offer outlets and avenues for new artists to be discovered, the

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