Chapter 3

The music industry has changed by leaps and bounds over the decades and will continue to change. Personally, being a huge music fan, the fact that music has gotten more and more portable over the years is a great thing. Now we can listen to he music we want where ever we want, in our car, on the bus, and just walking on the street. MP3s changed the way people listened to, and acquired their music. This also brought up the issue of illegal downloading which has exploded over the years. Even though downloading music illegally is against the law there are songs that I have gotten (yea, illegally) that aren't on iTunes. I know that iTunes does have a very large variety of music but they don't have everything. I think that some of that has to do with the industry.

I believe that the industry does change what we hear but if a person wants to hear a certain kind of music now that there is internet radio there is nothing stopping people from getting their music out there for people to hear. Yet, even though those radio stations open up different kinds of music, like Pandora, you still don't own them. I think that programs like Pandora and other internet music programs are great because they do work against the industry. They opened up a whole other world of music for me. The music that I like to listen to is not on the radio so I don't get exposed to new kinds of music very often, which makes the internet radio stations so valuable to me. 

I know that downloading music is wrong, but I don't have money to download music from iTunes. I am not saying that the artists don't deserve to get paid, because it is their job, but I guess as Americans we are always able to figure our way around things. Seeing the chart of who gets paid what does make me realize more that it is just more than the singer getting the money, that other people rely on that money too.