Introduction

Aims and objectives of the project

Music on the Internet will attempt to provide a brief overview of how various music industries have adapted to distribute music over the Internet, and the technology which allows digital distribution to be a reality in this still-evolving but highly profitable medium.

This paper is concerned with the Internet as a commercial medium which allows businesses to trade, market and promote their services or products to a world-wide customer base. The term Internet will be briefly defined, along with its history, and the processes involved in digitising audio for computer storage and transfer, though the main body of the work will lie in defining and discussing the specific technologies involved in preparing music and audio for delivery over the Internet, and the ways in which the music industry has utilised the Internet as a marketing and distribution tool.

As a result of new technologies developing on virtually a weekly basis, this essay will only attempt to analyse the range of technologies that are available on the Internet at the time of writing. As a general rule, the latest technologies will become dated within a few months and many of the arguments raised against the technology will no longer be relevant, but the history of the Internet’s development will remain unchanged, and each new development adds to that history. This paper will include case studies of the most prominent companies and the most influential technologies involved in bringing music to the Internet - those companies which have achieved most commercial and technological success, and, more often than not, those who have featured in the most press articles published on the Internet.

This paper will approach its subject matter in three main ways -

1. Historical - tracing the developments of the technology which allow the transfer of audio across the Internet, as well as the evolution of the medium, and of the music industry’s use of new technologies.
2. Technical - explanations of the technology involved in recording, transferring, distributing and selling music online.
3. Commercial - the music industries that trade on the Internet, market structure, demographics, and corporate information on the most prominent web-based music businesses, in the form of short case studies.

Academic studies of the music industry have thus far targeted one scene (such as house/techno, heavy metal, rock’n’roll etc) or musical territory (a country or group of countries for the purpose of marketing an artist or product) - ie The USA, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, The UK etc. Since the Internet allows companies to trade globally, this paper will feature a range of technologies developed by companies from all over the globe, and will take into account the online music market as a global industry rather than one which is governed by traditional concepts of territories.

The main body of this paper will contain technological and commercial analyses of, amongst others, American-based audio encoding technology (Real Audio and Liquid Audio music software), British custom-CD companies (Cerberus), Australian webzine Addicted to Noise, and internet radio projects from across the globe. However, the dominance of the North American music industry, its history and its companies has affected the content of this paper, the issues raised and the statistics used, since it is the largest market in the world and has the most information available on the World Wide Web.

This paper is accompanied by a 3.5" floppy disk containing a hypertext version of the text. Hypertext is a method of writing which allows various documents and pages to be interlinked without distracting the reader from the main body of the text. Due to the non-linear nature of hypertext, links may be accessed and read in any order, or not at all, depending on the reader’s preferences. The digital version of this paper is therefore intended to display the advantages of hypertext systems to the academic world, in that underlined references in the body can instantly access the original documents from their original sources on the Internet, allowing the reader to easily switch between various parts of this paper and its supporting documentation. The disk is formatted for use with a PC, and browser software such as Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer is required to view the hypertext essay. No Internet connection is necessary to view the author’s text, but is required to visit the referenced sources. Sources are referenced both within the main body of the text, and in an appendix exclusive to the hypertext version - ie not included in the printed version of Music on the Internet. This appendix is included as a point of reference for researchers into this new subject matter, and adds no academic weight to the work included in the main body of the text, apart from to once again show the advantages of working within a multimedia and hypertext environment.

The internet as a research tool

Because of the nature of this research paper, of the medium discussed and the technologies involved, most of the background reading and data collection for this work has been sourced from documents freely available on the Internet . Searching the Internet for research material allows a researcher's information to be as current as possible, avoiding the delay incurred between the development of new technology and the release of books or studies on the subject. In fact, the Internet is probably the best medium for finding sources on new technology since print media still seems to be falling behind.

Much of the research for this paper is derived from corporate, historical and technical information provided to customers from company web-sites . This facilitates the research process in that details can be found directly from the companies creating the technology or selling the service, rather than from books or periodicals, or other third parties. Many of the companies discussed in this paper also offer an archive of press releases, allowing a researcher to work from the same source as the journalists who wrote some of the articles quoted herein.

Vast improvements in graphic interface technology have facilitated the transition of the print media onto the Internet . Articles, news stories, reviews and practical advice columns from numerous magazines and trade journals are now commonly available on the Internet, as well as market research reports, statistics and conference papers, all of which comment on the cutting edge of technological development. The wealth of research materials available is therefore far superior to that found in any single library, despite the obvious problems that arise from the medium - selecting relevant material from an often endless stream of sources, inaccurate or poorly researched documents which can be misleading, and differentiating official sources of statistics and information from unauthorised sources.

Search engines have become an essential part of the online experience, allow often complex keyword searches of documents from all corners of the Internet, and are important to researchers in that they provide a list of documents matched to the keywords, many of which are rated out of 100% for relevance to the search criteria. Many of the news services and online magazines used during the research stage offer a search facility limited to their own archives, which is useful when seeking news stories regarding a specific product or event.

One current disadvantage of the Internet is the nature of its scripting language, HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language). Once a document has been written and published to the Internet, the addresses of links to other sites may change or be deleted, leaving the document with a series of dead links, which is often frustrating for both the researcher and the reader. Future advances in Internet technology will eradicate this problem, but at this moment in time, much of the research that has appeared on the Internet has moved or become untraceable. The online documentation referred to in the bibliography section of this paper are correct at the time of publishing, though may have changed by the time of reading.