Alternative ways of accessing music

Radio stations are not listened to as much now as they used to be because there are now more ways to listen to music. When driving home from work radio used to be the only thing to listen to in the car but nowadays there are ways to link up MP3 player and iPods to the car system to listen to your own music. YouTube is a major site used for listening to music. In the recent years a lot of new artists such as Ed Sheeran have hit the big time because of videos they’ve posted onto YouTube being watched. It’s a way of discovering new and old artists that you want to listen to and not in the hands of the DJs.

Gigs and tours are other great ways of seeing artists first hand a finding new music. Radio used to be one of the only ways to do this but gigging is now becoming more popular and people are more likely to pay for tickets. This also helps because a lot of people are now on better paid jobs and have the cars to travel around in to get to them. Gigs can be advertised by a radio though and this can be a way of people going to them.

Podcasts are now available online so if you miss your favourite radio show you can listen back to it. Podcasts aren’t copies of the whole show though, just the best bits so people aren’t listening to whole shows anymore. Another effect of this is people are now not as regularly available to listen to the radio because of work and other commitments.

iTunes is the new way of downloading music apart from illegal downloading. A lot of Apple users use this site to buy their music which means a lot of hard copy sales aren’t happening anymore. Radio can be the link to let people hear the music originally and they go out and buy it but not always nowadays because of all the alternative ways. Illegal downloading is becoming a major issue which is putting record shops out of business as well as the artists and record labels. Sites such as LimeWire and YouTube converter are becoming very popular within young age groups which is very concerning for the future. At the beginning of 2011 a new instant downloading scheme was put into place so as soon as you heard a song on the radio you were able to download it but this wasn’t very successful in the end as there were people downloading the song at different times and the artists that tried this didn’t do very well with sales figures. They also didn’t do very well in the charts.

Music channels also affect radio listening because of how easy they are to access. If you were doing housework or just sitting in the radio could often be relied on to break the silence but nowadays television music channels such as MTV, STARZ and 4MUSIC are becoming easier to listen to and more interesting. Radio lose a lot of listeners to these channels.