How Music Production Slowly Shifted to Music Online

Over the last century, the world of music has seen a great deal, popular artists such as Lan Freed, Elvis, Little Richard and Les Paul invented rock and roll. Awesome and jaw dropping performances of Jimi Hendrix and the popularly loved Beatles  who released the White Album and Woodstock, all these happened in upstate New York and gave birth to the music festival that we know today.

Time changes things and so does the internet, the model for discovering, listening to, buying, storing your music, and finding shows has completely changed with the advent of the internet and online music. Gone are the days of record labels. We are now embracing an era of digital music, such as those hosted in dedicated servers in Europe at redswitches.com.

What is Online Music

The video below describes the eventual change of music recording to digital music promotion and production.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkQGlTDY_po

The Birth of MP3s

In 1993, MP3s were invented. In encoding and compression format to create digital audio files. This facilitated the transfer and playback of audio files onto digital audio players.

It was at this time that a website called the internet underground music archive was launched in Santa Cruz, California. This has provided a venue for independent artist to share their music and communicate with their audience.

With the introduction of MP3, this has routed the traditional avenue of record labels to digital formats.

Musicians Online Presence – A Start Of New Beginnings

By 1998,  artists could register a free URL and web page on the site, giving birth to the musicians online presence as we know it. That same year, as the MP3 gained in popularity. A website called Remo TECA emerged from the .com bubble and offered a window for the purchase of music online for shadowing the sound of things to come.

Then of course came Napster, pioneering online peer-to-peer file-sharing in the form of MP3 music files. Which as its height had some 25 million users downloading, over 80 million songs and catapulting the music industry into the throes of the digital revolution.

The iTunes Music Store

And Steve Jobs came along, and figured it all out for the music loving world by offering 99 cents songs in MP3 format through the iTunes Music Store. Jobs and Apple grounded distribution agreements with all five major record labels prior to the launch of the now called “iTunes Store.”

What’s more is Steve Jobs and Apple paired iTunes with easily the best and most sustainable portable digital music player of the world has ever seen, the iPod. Folks could buy digital music from the iTunes Store, download it and then inject it into their iPods and listen to it wherever they go.

Endless audio permutations proliferated the now illuminated road ahead. Seemingly overnight iTunes became the largest music retailer in the United States. Nowadays, the path to music discovery, streaming, purchase, playing, storage and finding the live shows you need to get to is paved by some key multifaceted products.