How has the internet changed the music press?

How internet has changed music press

With the fast development of technology, there has also been a big development in music press. Before the internet, people were dependent on record stores to go buy hard copies of vinyl's, which then started to move on wards to much smaller CD's. The smaller size of a CD seemed much easier and practical, but then with the fast moving of internet downloads were seen as even more practical. 

First of people were able to download music onto their PC's, however it usually took a long time and was no where near as good quality as the music we can download so quickly is now. As the internet progressed even more, apps like Spotify are now popular and readily available, but a big change with this is that the money from downloads no longer goes directly to the artist like it used to. 

As well as a change in the purchase of music, the internet has also changed a vast amount of advertisement of artists or albums, from print to digital. Before smart phones and laptops, all new music news was spread by just talking to one another or flicking through music magazines. How ever with the quick click of a button it was suddenly so much easier to access, and was also free. As you would expect, this rapidly lead to a decline in purchases of music magazines, but also new advertising strategies of the artists.

 With the popularity of the internet, artists are now more likely to want to appear as a pop up next to a YouTube video as advertisement instead of going for a promotion or interview in a music magazine in the way they may have used to do. 

However, it isn't all bad for the magazines, people who truly love the magazine can pay to subscribe on line, which is seen as more convenient and is keeping up with the trends of online purchases as subscriptions. This is another platform for the magazines to make themselves noticed on now, as in all reality lots of the young target readership of today will be spending a lot more time on line instead of at the local shop looking through magazines. The swift move of technology has also invented internet tracking, this means in google tracks repetitive searches of a certain artist or genre of music, on line pop ups of more relevant artists or magazines are available. This is another example of the internet changing music press to being at the click of a mouse.

The convergence of music press is merging the typical printed music magazines in with online outlets from websites to apps through different digital media platforms, creating a wider viewing for all. The synergy of the combination of online and physical music press is, in my view, creating a much better outcome for music magazines, making them much wider spread over larger generations of music lovers and also closing the gap between a more old fashioned approach to viewing music press and the more modern and fast moving way of discovery of music.

Overall I think the change internet has given music press is positive. Although some disagree about the way artists now receive their money, their music will only be available on these apps if they give permission and old fashioned records are still readily available, and can even be ordered to your house with the progress of internet now! Music press has changed for the better as artists can advertise and post themselves with much more ease and self control, up and coming artists have a much better platform to work from and more likely hood of being discovered and as for the fans, everything is now at their fingertips, whenever they want it.

Plenty of music magazines that were first printed can now also be found online, for example Q magazine, NME, clash and MOJO.