increasingly threatening to an industry that had previously made most of its  money from people paying to listen. Before the internet, to hear your favorite artists’ new record, you’d have to go to the store and purchase it. You would pay to see their live shows instead of watching a shaky concert video uploaded to YouTube. When you would get in your car and listen to your favorite station, music labels were making money from radio play. Now, it’s not uncommon to hear people say “Oh I don’t really listen to radio anymore.” The birth of the CD in the 90’s was soon overshadowed by MP3’s introduction around the turn of the century as a faster, cheaper, and more efficient way to store music. Minor digital piracy almost always goes unpunished because of how easy it is to

download an MP3 file. MP3 essentially made music a lot “freer” than its current structure could  afford. All of these developments were contributing factors to the industry’s metamorphosis, as there was no other option but to change with the times. To break things down further, let’s talk about the two of the biggest acts of all time—the Beatles and Michael Jackson. It all started with a collaboration between Jackson and former Beatle Paul McCartney on the lead single for McCartney’s 1983 album “Pipes of Peace” called “Say Say Say.” McCartney is said to have given MJ some advice that he should invest in music publishing. Funnily enough, this would come back to bite McCartney a few years later, however, when he was outbid by Jackson in 1985 when he

purchased the publishing rights to the vast majority of the Beatles’ catalog for $47 million. Jackson was at the height of his financial power, and now made money every time someone bought the Beatles’ music or played it on TV or the radio. This was on top of the other business ventures contributing to his enormous wealth. The potential to capitalize off of music ownership was severely jeopardized by MP3, because there was no way to track all of the illegal downloads that filled an entire generation’s music libraries for years. Luckily, streaming platforms swooped in and saved the day, allowing record labels, publishing companies, and people like Michael Jackson to get their power back. If you’ve been following music news

at all recently, you’ve probably seen countless stories on the online scuffle between Taylor Swift and Scooter Braun, a talent manager and entrepreneur who now owns the rights to her early music. Let’s just say she is not thrilled about it. So what does Braun’s ownership of Swift’s old music mean in this day and age? Social media, streaming, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence technologies have had a transformative impact on how artists put out their music and interact with their listeners. Social media allows music artists to connect with their fans in a much more interactive way, for better or for worse. Streaming platforms like Apple Music and Spotify have somewhat saved publishing companies and people who own the