2011: The Year That Rocked The Traditional Recording Industry

Some years ago, there was a prediction that eventually the entire world would turn digital. CEOs like the late Steve Jobs of Apple, who pushed for the first iPods, predicted this a decade ago and even the head of Microsoft, Bill Gates, predicted the start of this digital revolution in a book some years ago.

As early as 2004, sites like Napster, which encouraged people to downline entire digital libraries of audio from top bands, new and old, were branded "pirates" as the recording industry staged an attempt to put down streaming or downloading with patent infringement suits that failed or were settled. Indeed, artists were glad of these developments as, industry observers noted at the time, that it gave the artist a chance to gain total control over not only the product but also the profit and it let them define just what the industry could earn, rather than the other way around.

Once the floodgates were opened and devices became available that encouraged downloading and streaming, such as Blackberry Smartphones and RIM 5.0 apps that allowed users to access Internet music services, as well as the second-generation iPod and the iTunes music service, one could see the handwriting on the wall. It was handwriting that led to a sales increase of 8.4 percent in 2011 in digital streaming, while traditional physical album sales dipped 5 percent, says a Neilsen and Billboard survey. Only the stylist Adele helped to save album sales from tanking totally as her album "21" helped pump up physical sales during the last weeks of the year.

Nicki Minaj's "Super Bass" with 84.9 million streams and 71 million videos led the digital surge at the end of the year. All of this should give the traditional "brick and mortar" record industry a lot to think about. In the space of just eight years, digital downloading and streaming have become the norm, while traditional album sales are dropping.

Mike Moore, CEO of Headliner.fm, put it best when, in a recent interview, he noted that many digital listeners don't care if they own any music devices at all. "A whole generation doesn't care if they own anything; accessibility has become paramount", he noted in an interview. What they want, Moore and others industry observers continue to note is to have music available on all their devices wherever they are and whenever they want it.

If anyone has been watching the subtle changes in the way music has been viewed since the first iPods appeared nearly a decade ago, and since the Napster suits were raised, they have seen that customers want music their own way, not the way the traditional industry was willing to give it to them - usually on costly CDs or DVDs. Yes, both are digital, but they are aren't very portable and the players they require are rather bulky. When Apple developed its iTunes library, where users could stream tunes for 99-cents-a-shot to wherever they were on the Internet and as small startups continued the Napster tradition, the straws that broke the music industry's hold on tunes were broken forever.

Now, all a user needs is an iPhone with the Pandora app or an Android device with the proper app and they have access to all of the audio they want wherever they are, as long as there's an Internet connection available. It's a service that people are willing to pay for, too, as long as it gives them streaming on demand wherever they are and on whatever device they are using. Facebook and Spotify are experimenting with a model that allows users to pay by the stream rather than by the song. It seems that this is the general direction in which the audio is moving, as well.

In a way, this is actually a green way to do things, too. As some industry observers note, streaming doesn't require plastic discs that can last for eons in landfills and which, when they are cracked, can leach out all kinds of interesting chemicals. So, this could even help global warming in a weird way.