Music-video YouTube case-study Foxes and Fossils
The music industry in flux again, there appears to be a mounting effort to eliminate downloads in favor of streaming by the major services.
- CD-Baby does not sell CDs anymore, they are honoring downloads purchased earlier, but going forward, they are distributing exclusively to streaming services.
- Pressing a link to most iTunes search result links no longer takes you to the download page, it will take you to the Apple Music streaming service.
- Amazon has developed a high quality streaming service; however, they still offer downloads and CDs.
- Google Play has announced they will be shutting down their download service.
- YouTube has developed the streaming service "music.youtube". It is unclear whether or not you can keep your music off of music.youtube after uploading a video, artists can distribute albums and singles to the platform without a music video.
This development can have harsh consequences to independent musicians, instead of receiving seventy cents on the dollar for a download, the artist share is reduced to hundredths of a penny per spin on a streaming service and hope that fans will spin the stream repeatedly.