The Digital Age of Music: From Records to Streaming music permeates every aspect of our daily lives, and the explosion in legal access-based music services combined with illegal online file sharing services means more or less all the recorded world’s music is available to listen to on demand. This has profoundly changed the way we use and relate to recorded music.

Music is a great example of how technology can transform and disrupt nearly any industry – just look at what happened to CDs when Napster and iTunes introduced new ways to buy and consume recorded music. While the internet cannibalized CD sales and caused a crisis for the music industry, it eventually saved it from its worst slump since the era of disco.

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Streaming has turned music into an on-demand service and opened up opportunities for more artists to reach a global audience without a major label deal. It isn’t a perfect solution – streaming has its own problems, including the compression of audio files and lower quality. But it has helped music to reclaim some of its lost glory, and it could soon be joined by advances in virtual reality and 5G which will provide new ways for people to consume music.

The internet also allows musicians to interact with their fans directly, and platforms such as Bandcamp, Spotify and non-fungible tokens (NFT) have transformed how and where music is made, sold and listened to. As a result, more artists than ever are seeing their songs played in the 10s and 100s of millions – over 1,800 achieve this in the UK last year alone.