Music Management in the Digital Age

Background

The way people treat music in our days has totally changed as a result of the current developments in hardware and software, as well as the evolution of the Internet. People do not buy CDs or records anymore. Nowadays, people store music data on their disks and listen to music via portable devices (i-pods, mobile phones etc.). Moreover, the advent of Web 2.0 has brought colossal changes in the field of music management. In the digital age, there is a turn from the established MP3 format to the online streaming of music and video clips. Social networks and the solution of cloud computing, which do not require storing data in disks, are the new trends in music consumption and distribution. All these changes create new issues and force the necessity for innovative ways of digital music management.

The emerging form of the Internet and the WWW is known by the term “Web 2.0.” The former structure (now known as “Web 1.0”) was primarily based on passive access to content that someone else (usually a professional) had created and published. The current trend facilitates the creation, assimilation and distribution of information and knowledge. There is a clear separation between highly popular Web 2.0 sites and the “old Web.” Three kinds of shifts can be distinguished:

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  Technological: Scripting and presentation technologies used to render the site and allow user interaction,

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  Structural: Purpose and layout of the site, and

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  Sociological: Notions of friends and groups (Cormode & Krishnamurthy, 2008).

At a technical level, Web 2.0 is based on small chunks of information, loosely interconnected through a range of standards and web services. Web 2.0 is blurring the boundaries, allowing consumers to be themselves the producers (Knowles, 2007).

The development of new hardware solutions also plays a crucial role in the aforementioned multimedia manipulation of Web 2.0. Portable devices are the state-of-the-art media for producing, reproducing and delivering multimedia data over the web in an “anywhere - anytime” manner. Average users own generic devices, such as mobile telephones, PDAs, portable computers and tablet PCs. These days, mostly entertainment devices (MP3 players, iPods, portable video game consoles etc.) deal with communicative and multimedia operations and have the same capabilities as personal computers (e.g. Internet connectivity, high quality graphics, etc.). The case of the mobile phone is typical.

Focusing explicitly on music, there is yet a number of solutions utilizing multimedia and Web 2.0 for the sale, playing and promotion of digital music files. Apart from general music software solutions, even operating systems give great emphasis on the multimedia web management in our days. Google Chrome OS is the new Google’s operating system, which is mainly Internet-oriented.