Copyright, What it Meant for Music

Between 1997 and 2001, the music industry faced a growing challenge: how to protect intellectual property in a world where copying digital files was effortless. While the 90s was a period of new discovery, emerging talent, and fear of the new millennium, people who had access to the internet were getting creative with different ways to share music over the internet. In 1997, five major companies had held 80% of the market in the music industry from selling physical forms of music media. However, as Dr. Ulrick Dolata points, these five major companies had experienced a dramatic drop in sales over the decade from 1997 to 2007(Dolata, 2011). Dropping rates in sales was partly due to the fact that these major companies were at first slower in making their music accessible in this new form of media consumption.

File sharing had been largely underestimated and companies soon began to realize this. They quickly learned that through the internet the dissemination of music through MP3s without a degradation in quality was one of the reasons they found that dropped their sales. The transition between free media over having to pay for it quickly influenced the way that many young people viewed, listened to music at the time. Severely underestimating the possibilities of the web caused the shift into establishing proper restrictions and enforcing said restrictions harshly. This was probably much more plausible in the earlier years of the web, but in current days illegal movies, music, and media can always be found on the web today. Between the music industry and net surfers, a growing disconnect was felt. Trading files established a sense of community with the music scene. This cultural gap would dramatically change as file-sharing technology became more sophisticated and widespread.