Summer Investigation: Context

How illegal & legal downloads are impacting the music industry?

I have chosen this topic as I believe it to be important; many consumers believe that illegal downloads have a huge impact on the music industry financially, which is true, however I want to attempt to find out whether legal downloads are having an equal effect – are they profiting the industry financially as much as the illegal downloads are costing them? And do they serve another purpose in helping the audience access more music from both signed and unsigned bans? It is not only an important area but also a relevant one as there has been a rise in new technologies and illegal download sites have become easier to access on the internet and seldom require downloading a torrent programme, consumers can download just single files to their computer, which saves space and time as they don’t have to wait for the programme to install. The predominate reason for choosing this question was because downloading is easily accessible to the internet population and I wanted to find the impact that it is having on the on music industry.

In order to find this information I will research using the internet and potentially plan to find download rates from the past year and how much the industry lost due to piracy and how much they profited through legal downloads. I will also attempt to find out whether unsigned bands believe that legal downloads and sites, such as www.myspace.com, have helped more audiences access their music; I will email bands through www.myspace.com using a short questionnaire. As well as using a questionnaire to research the bands opinions I will also use a questionnaire to hand to a select focus group, I will hand 20 questionnaires out, 10 on www.facebook.com and 10 personally, this will also help me to research which is a better forum for collecting information. The focus group questionnaire will inquire whether participants believe that illegal downloads are big industry problem and whether they illegally download themselves and why this is; I will also ask how the participants find out about unsigned bands or new bands and whether they believe that legal downloading/music sites (www.myspace.com) are having a positive effect on new talent, also how badly they think the new talent is being affected by illegal downloads.