The Transition of the Music Industry and its Effect on the Economy

Abstract

Recent technological advancements have completely changed the entire world, and the music industry is no exception. The advancement caused not only the transition to occur in the music industry from CDs and records to online streaming services, but also dropped the production cost of music. People were able to create music at a cheaper cost which was supposed to democratize and introduce more competition to the market. However, this did not happen. Rather, the industry became more monopolized and dominated by the giants in the industry. Recently, we have many people who claim that pop music is getting worse(which is subjective, but still relevant as data). The reason behind this might be caused by the monopolization since the monopolization would generally lead to the drop in price and quality of the product over time. 

Using behavioural economic theories, the research examines how the transition of media might have caused the thought process of the consumers when selecting a song to change, resulting in many other factors that affect the process of decision making gaining more authority. While explaining how technological advancement and the creation of the internet (more specifically, the SNS) helped the industry to form a monopoly.