A comparison between traditional and new media

The music industry does no longer limit itself to traditional media such as records, cassettes, audio CDs or videos. The beginnings of the music business were almost exclusively driven by sheet music, which was printed for the musician. Today, a powerful international industry has emerged. No longer only musicians are the consumers. Catering also to the listeners, the viewers and the supporters, who regularly buy music, a special music branch has emerged.

Beginning with encyclopaedias, soon magazines have developed and specialist literature on musicians, music theory and pieces of music were published. Soon radio stations and music TV channels, broadcasting music video content, became more and more important in the business. New technology standards and formats were introduced. Thus, media devices became smaller and smaller. Provided content shifted from analogue data to digital files. It is quite normal for a car audio system to include a media player for audio CD. High-tech systems might even work completely digitally and do no longer need any media disc to play music. Compression technologies such as MP3 make media storage and compression easier today. New media such as the internet emerged and revolutionised the industry.

Digital media are available on an online media portal today and can be downloaded either for free or at lower cost than the content stored on CDs or DVDs. The industry has brought new issues to the music industry: the selling rights business, intellectual property, illegal copying and burning. However, the internet provides a lot of free content to its users: Periodicals publish parts of their content and in addition even user-generated content. Books have – in theory – to be no longer printed as they can be downloaded at lower cost.

The trend goes to audio-visual media. A personal training CD might replace the real experience of attending a certain course. Besides, DVD media enable the user not only to listen to music, but also to watch the musicians and their performance. When we remember former times, a record could only partially give us a real impression and sense of a live concert – the DVD offers first-hand content like sitting in the first row. This has also effects on home entertainment systems, which are assumed by professionals to become more and more important as forecasts state that consumers will increase their media consumption budgets in the future. These budgets include cost not only for content, but also for infrastructure such as high speed internet access and HDTV compatible devices.