Indie music

Global music industry is now evolving to a new format. Before internet and portable music player is become as famous as now, we all listen to music from just a few sources.

Some old time player uses tape cassettes, some newer player come with disc player such as audio CD and laser disc. There's no way how people can make copy of these disc unless they have a very advanced sound system with double cassette deck player. huh !

Nowadays, copying music is no longer a very sacret word. Even street dealer now have mobile phone capable for playing music, most low-end laptop has DVD burner included, and when you have a USB capable device, you'll easily found a device to plug it in. It's no longer illegal, at least not in front of law. They call it share.

As you know, music sales is shrinking year to year. Business Week has the story. Less and less people buy music (at least with traditional way, buy CD or Cassete), they more like download and share among friends. There's not hard to find a song shared across internet. I wont mention any, because then Blogger might shut down this blog.

The most affected party in this situation is music label company such as Sony/BMG, EMI, Universal and Warner (known as BIG FOUR). But on other side, there's still large number of creative people working outside of the industry cage. Some people call them Indie Music. First time I thought it was a word related with Indonesie Music (fyi, I'm from Indonesia). Later I find out that's independent music. See related article on Wikipedia for more detail about indie music.

But due to circumstances the indie music is have less publishing & marketing power than big label company's music. But, I think in the future, the condition will change. There will me more more people publishing their own music without backed by a label.