In this digital era, the consumer behaviour is changing and taking a different path. This behaviour was amplified with the COVID-19 crisis, as we were able to observe a significant growth in online businesses caused by people locked inside their homes. Therefore, we wonder about the music industry and the consumption of music as an entertaining tool, an inspirational tool, a learning tool, etc.
The online consumption of music is a relatively an old
phenomenon. When talking about online consumption, we mostly refer to online
streaming due to the popularity of streaming platforms such as Spotify, Deezer,
Itunes, etc. Hence, Internet provides users with the ability to own the music
through the legal download and the illegal download.
Accordingly, researchers have discussed the online
consumption of music, and have identified groups of consumers, from which we
focus on only two; the possessive consumers and the fashionable consumers. The
first group is about owning the music, in the form of a tangible good (a CD) or
enjoy the accessibility of his/her music offline. The second group of
fashionable consumers, they are keen to follow trends, so they tend towards
streaming services in order to stay up-to-date with the newest releases and the
best 100 streaming songs. Despite a CD is pricier than legal download, a recent
research have showed that streaming is complementary to buying CDs, as the
consumer prefers to own a tangible element of their preferred artists.
Now about the piracy, which is in fact an immoral
behaviour. In part, this is true because piracy is illegal and mostly deprive artists and the
whole industry behind from generating the revenue allowing them to prosper and
live from their art. It is also considered that consumers sensitive to price
tend to go for piracy, but only those with consciousness tend to prefer legal
download than buying CDs. Nonetheless, in some countries where international
payment and online payment are somehow restricted and difficult. This brings
another issue to the table and suggests different perspective of the act of
piracy. How could people enjoy their preferred artists when they do not have
the access to buying their music. For the local artists they do not count on
the revenue coming from online media, since the CPM is not significant,
therefore, their presence on Internet allows them to score visibility, which
leads to live events scheduling.
The question is whether this illegal downloading harms
the industry, on the international level, due its numbers compared to the
number of legal activities?
Acknowledgment:
Hyunsuk Im & Jaemin Jung (2016): Impacts of personal characteristics on the choice of music consumption mode: purchasing CD, downloading, streaming, and piracy, Journal of Media Business Studies
Minhyung Lee, HanByeol Stella Choi, Daegon Cho, Heeseok Lee (2020) “Can digital consumption boost physical consumption? The effect of online music streaming on record sales”
