Summaries what you have learned about the state of the music industry in 2012

Music videos play a big part in shaping not only the image of the given artist, but also grabbing the target audience’s attention and interest in that artist and his/her work. Audiences main targeted by music videos seems to come from the television i.e. music channels, and the internet. Nowadays sites such as vimeo and youtube are specifically designed to allow the public to enjoy not only the song, but its video too, and in the end the music industry seems to not mind it because it does bring about popularity for that particular artist. Similarly, when you are on one of these channels even if you’re not searching for something through the suggestion on the side they might end up taking you to another video and so on, therefore giving audience the opportunity to look at other music videos.

Site like youtube and vimeo are successful in what they do because in the end audience take pleasure from watching music videos. We not only familiarise ourselves with the artist of the song, but also begin to understand their image and therefore the personality they try and put forward much better, creating a bond between the artist and his/her fans. This as a result might lead to them buying their next album. Consequently, the appeal of music videos will depend on its target audience, because a music video’s content will very depending on what will relate and appeal to its target audience. For instance, someone like Example would be expected to have a lot of young people having fun in his video, therefore relating to his main target audience of young people. Similarly, having a flashy, catchy video can play a big part in promoting your song because a lot of the time if we just listen to a song we might find it boring, but adding the experience of watching it to the listing makes it much more interesting and memorable, therefore brining pleasure to its target audience.

Music videos do play a big role in the music industry, because they are a way of motivating its audience to go out and buy that artist’s album as a sing of appreciation maybe. Similarly, music videos promote the artist and having things such as a lot of hits on youtube could also reveal a lot about how popular an artist is.

Which labels dominate the music industry?

There are four main recording labels (also known as ‘The big four’) which dominate the music industry today:  

Sony Music – controlled by Sony Corporation of America,

EMI - owned by Citigroup,

Warner – owned by Access Industries , and

Universal – owned by French media conglomerate Vivendi.

The music industry has definitely changed in the past few years, especially when facing the problem of the amount of actual CD sales it makes. The internet, along side software developments such as compression, player formats, and hardware such as PDA, flash memory all have a profound effect on the music industry. They allow business models such as virtual record labels, online radios, digital downloads and streaming to take place, which in a way puts the sale of CDs in the background something that was certainly not the case in the past when music videos and songs as a whole were designed to be turned into hits that people would then ant to buy records of. It seems that just like anything else in the 21^st century, the music industry will have to try and come up with new ideas and ways of promoting its products and selling them in order to keep up with the developing world, and the examples a mentioned before a ways of it doing so, after all technology now plays a key part in everyone’s life. Similarly, the role music videos play in the 21^st century is one they’ve always played really, where they try and promote the artist to its audience, however because of this new way of distribution vie the internet, site such as youtube or links you see everyday on sites such as facebook, music videos have began to play a very big role in the music industry as they play a key part in the artist’s image.