Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Online Music
It's November 2009 and we're nearing the end of a decade. It's been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. With that in mind, over the coming weeks ReadWriteWeb will look back on the defining Web trends of the past 10 years. From the dot com boom, to the nuclear winter after, to the passion and enthusiasm of the pre-Web 2.0 innovations (such as RSS and podcasting), to the highs and hype of Web 2.0, to the current era of the real-time Web, to the near future of the Internet of Things. We'll explore all of this and more.
We're starting with online music. No industry, except arguably the newspaper one, has been rocked (pardon the pun) more by the Internet than the music industry.
Napster & Kazaa: Online File Sharing
The online music decade started with Napster, a music file sharing service created by Shawn Fanning that operated between June 1999 and July 2001. Napster enabled people to freely share MP3 files over the Internet; however it quickly ran into major legal trouble. Napster was the subject of lawsuits in 2000 by touchy metal band Metallica and others. It was eventually shut down by court order, after several major record labels went after the service.
After Napster's demise, a P2P application called Kazaa became the most popular service for music file sharing. But it too eventually succumbed to record industry attacks.
Curiously, both Napster and Kazaa were recently reincarnated as law-abiding services. After years of re-launch attempts, Napster was acquired by Best Buy in September 2008 and was born again in May 2009. Meanwhile Kazaa turned into a legit music subscription service in July this year.
iTunes / iPod: Digital Music Goes Commercial
While Napster and Kazaa tried to skirt around the commercial imperatives of music, like paying artists, Apple took on the record industry in an entirely legal way. In January 2001, Apple launched a digital music player for music called iTunes. Then in April 2003, the iTunes Store was launched. It offered the ability to buy songs for 99 cents each, which had a major impact on the music industry.
Soon after Napster's demise in 2001, Apple launched what was to become a revolutionary device in the music industry. The iPod was launched in October 2001 and it became the most popular portable music player since the Sony Walkman in the 1980s.
Fast forward to 2009 and iTunes continues to evolve. In January Apple announced that iTunes would go DRM-free. In September 2009 Apple launched version 9 of iTunes, which included a Genius-like recommendation feature for apps and 'iTunes LPs' - a feature that brings liner notes and artwork to digital albums.
MySpace: Music & Social Networking
MySpace was launched in August 2003 and soon became a popular hangout for local bands, especially indie rockers. MySpace provided a way for those bands to promote their music and reach a wide network through social networking.
As ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez wrote last month, it was a virtuous circle for MySpace. The bands' presence on MySpace "began to attract a young, hip crowd of users who were interested in following pop culture, and, in particular, the up-and-coming artists they discovered while browsing through the network. Only eight months after its launch, MySpace began to experience exponential growth, as its users created profiles and friended others who would then, in turn, invite more users to join the social network. Thanks to the "network effect," MySpace soon became the place to be online. Everyone was there."
However by 2008, MySpace had ceded the social networking crown to Facebook. In 2009, MySpace is once again trying to reclaim its heritage as a music service. In October MySpace launched "Artist Dashboards" and integrated its music video vault with recent acquisition iLike.
Pandora & last.fm: Online Music Discovery
Online music services have flourished in the 'web 2.0' era, when the ability to find new music and share it with others via the Web became increasingly sophisticated.
Two services in particular stand out. One is Pandora, a free online music discovery service. Pandora was founded in 2000 and continues to grow, despite various legal issues over the years. As ReadWriteWeb's Frederic Lardinois noted earlier this year, Pandora derives its revenue from targeted audio advertising in its music streams and affiliate sales through Amazon's MP3 store and iTunes.
Last.fm is another online music discovery service. It was founded in 2002 and was sold to CBS in 2007. It continues to innovate in 2009, for example in May this year last.fm announced combo stations, allowing a user to create a station with up to three artists or tags.
Conclusion
This post and series was inspired by one of my favorite blogs and podcasts, NPR's All Songs Considered. They're currently looking back at the decade in music and much of the discussion is about how the Internet helped define it.
And it's true, when you think of music at the end of 2009 you think of iTunes, Pandora and last.fm - MySpace even. The record industry is still coming to terms with these and other changes.
Tell us your online music memories of the past 10 years. What's been your favorite online music product or service during that time?
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Why not include 2009/2010 with Spotify?
Deezer missing ^^
Last.fm definitely stands out, because unlike Spotify or Pandora, it can function internationally!
No so true @Simon. Last.fm is fully available only in selected countries.
"our current basic subscription doesn’t allow for any on-demand listening; a basic subscription will give you the benefits described here, but it won’t allow you to play any tracks you want in full length that you can’t listen to as a non-subscriber either.
In the US, the UK and Germany we’re publicly beta testing our free listening service called “Free On-Demand”, which allows you to listen to most tracks up to three times for free. When the beta is over, we’ll offer a different subscription package with unlimited access to our music catalogue."
http://www.last.fm/help/faq
Posted by: http://openid.aol.com/butbutm
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November 11, 2009 2:39 AM
A combination of Spotify, Last.fm and Hypemachine provide a solid experience for my listening preferences. I'm also a Spotify premium subscriber so that I can utilise the iPhone app and sync playlists!
I began purchasing digital music with the Amazon MP3 store. I think it provided real competion for Itunes and led to the increase of DRM-free music on the internet.
I will look old school but one of my favorite place to get some music, back in time, was on mIRC. There was dedicated #channels for specific types of music. It was, for me the best source of "trusted music files" as it was personnal collection who were shared. No surprises with wrong file names ;) Ahhhh mIRC ;)
I think The end of this decade is Social Networking's era. Facebook and Tweeter are leading than Other similar sites....
The decade known for killing off an enormous industry of selling cheap plastic discs, FTW!
These services are all great, sure. Everyone is always so focused on how fans find and consume music. But I think what's so much more significant and important here is that this was the decade that anyone with a computer and an original MP3 could become a self-published band and launch a genuine career without the help of a record label.
Looking at online music over the past decade is also interesting for the way it previews (to some extent) and serves as a model (positive and negative) for later developments in other media. For example, though the parallels are of course not perfect, in movies/TV one can compare Napster to the Pirate Bay, iTunes perhaps to Hulu or Netflix (or to itself), MySpace to Flixster, and Pandora to Jinni. Perhaps we'll start to see more parallels in books as well.
Since I own an Ipod, ITunes works best for me.I find it so convenient and I must say everything is in there. I've been using this for years.
http://www.advertisespace.com
I remember working at a Media Play back in 1996 and I learned how much markup there was on a single CD. I couldn't believe it!
I think that the best filesharing service that was out there was, at the time in 2000-01, audiogalaxy, by being light years ahead of its time with auto-downloading, sending files from one place to another, and setting up friend boxes and groups that you could share music with. It pre-dated all social networking that we know of today, while doing things that only torrents can do now.
Also, muxtape was a notable omission. That was a great idea and a great service and I hope (and I bet) that we'll see something similar to it again in the future.
Remember WinAmp? And the customizable skins. Somewhere around version 3, iTunes and other players became more appealing and I forgot about them, but they appear to still be around – even providing a paid player service.
I use Itunes when I want to purchase an individual song.
For a complete album, I still purchase CDs because of the better sound quality.
With a good hi-fi sound system, I prefer to listen to unaltered music, rather than listen to music compressed into MP3s.
When a legal OINK emerges I'll be there. I never use(d) BT outside of it, I used Oink for all kinds of music that couldn't be purchased outside of Ebay or a treasure find at local shop. I'm a long time Emusic and Itunes user but they can't touch the sound quality and rarities. Great site with great people and true music fans.
This blog posting still sums it up best:
http://www.demonbaby.com/blog/2007/10/when-pigs-fly-death-of-oink-birth-of.html
Sherry, I still use Winamp when booted into Windows. Still haven't quite found a player that can be made as compact with as minimal of a resource impact as Winamp.
I will skip the obvious (Napster changed my DJ and music lover life far too many times) and go with SoundCloud.com
The very 2.0 ability to comment straight on the timeline is addictive, very social and seems now such an obvious feature for any hosting services where DJs would like to upload their mix.
www.freeallmusic.com best thing to come in 2010
Given that the decade officially ends at the end of December 2010, we've still got a while left.
look at this -> sharethemusic.com
I thought that we are hunted might have made it to this list as an online music discovery website.
http://wearehunted.com
I guess a lot of sites missed the cut.
People have found that they can listen to music, their favorite types of music, online, for free with minimal to NO commercial interruptions...no DJs talking all the time...just music...the way you want it?
Don;t believe me? Check it out at http://www.youronlineradio.com
My favorite music find of the last decade was http://gomusic.ru now http://gomusicnow.com Full CD's, great CD's at an unbelievable price. So much so that I've stopped free downloading.
Definitely Spotify is my smashing number one. In Spain you have to subscribe to Last.fm and Pandora does not work. Both used to offer full service. Spotify so far covers all my expectations. Of course if I could choose I would go for Last.fm. Blip.fm was not bad till it was forced to control uploaded music.
In my opinion: All we need is http://www.Ciiju.de. Sharing music legally with best friends, getting recommendations and much more...
i love http://www.setlist.fm - the concert wiki
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