by Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee) A decade after iTunes demolished the traditional music industry the arrival of Simfy Africa finally gives South Africans a legal equivalent.
The music industry, for all its culture of revolution, has always resisted change, and almost always to its enormous cost. When a program called Napster arrived at the end of the 1990s to allow online sharing of digital music files between individuals, the industry took to the courts to shut it down.
The music industry succeeded, giving it the confidence to resist any attempt to embrace the concept of digital, or to find new ways to add value to a disenchanted public. It insisted on sticking to a business model that was decades old: selling an album of about 10 songs to give fans access to the one song they wanted to hear.
Then came iTunes, an online music service integrated with Apple’s iPod, a digital alternative to the Sony Walkman. Apple’s charismatic CEO Steve Jobs was able to convince most major American music labels to allow digital tracks to be sold on iTunes, and also played on computers.
Overnight, the album died.
Individual tracks at a dollar a time made so much more sense to consumers. But it also meant that the music industry imploded – from a $33-billion business in the 1990s to $16.2bn in 2011. In the USA in 2011, digital sales overtook physical for the first time, taking 50,3% of the market. Ironically, along with that landmark, album sales grew for the first time since 2004, as new artists like Adele gave the mass market a more compelling reason to buy a full set of songs.
