Music Industry Crisis

Music videos are a popular way to relate and express the narrative behind the meaning of a song. The videos relate and have correspondence to the meaning of the songs. However, although music videos have become the norm and are now mandatory for an artist to release, before it became normal, there were a couple of issues present.

The idea that the music industry were in favour more towards white artists for their music videos is something to be argued upon. Back in the early 80's, Michael Jackson released his short feature-film for his classic hit single: 'Thriller'. Before the release of this music video, there was a strong lack of black artists music videos being released and premiered onto the monopolising music video company: MTV. It was almost as if they did everything within their power to avoid featuring black artists on their channel unless they were highly successful and in favour of the mass audience. After seeing the success that Jackson created with his music video, this then pioneered more artists to follow upon his footsteps and achieve similar success, allowing other black and other ethnic minorities to become successful and breakthrough within the music industry and within a company like MTV.

Another music industry crisis I found worthy talking about was the impact of the technology and interference of the internet. With the internet taking the world by the storm, this allowed the public to purchase music online as opposed to leaving their houses to go to a local CD store. But the impact this left within the music industry was that people were purchasing less music from stores, leading to company's like HMV to close down as people could simply buy their music online. Furthermore, with the interference of music, this impacted negatively upon the music industry due to people using piracy on music. People were illegally downloading music from artists, meaning that artists wouldn't essentially make money from the illegal downloads, impacting sales. This also became a problem for artists now as their music often becomes leaked before the anticipated release, which again impacts sales as people hear the music illegally.