Traditional media institutions feel threatened by new media- "if they don't keep up, they will die" (Luhrs, 2007). How far do you agree with this statement?

Institutions are finding it hard to keep up with the audiences demands. They no longer want the most talented artists but the most popular, with the biggest brand image. Most importantly they want easy access to these songs.

Conglomerates like UMG struggle to get their audiences to buy their music legally as they can get it for free online. When a song is played on the radio the customer wants to buy it, but legal downloads and CDs are often not released for a few weeks. Therefore they customer will go on to the internet and get it straight away for free. This is causing problems for media institutions all over the place, as they are relying on their customers to buy the songs from them legally.

Different media institutions have seen the problems these illegal downloads are causes so have tired lots of way to stop it. For example:

• CDs were encoded using DRM (digital rights management) so songs couldn't be copied
• Illegal downloaders were fined £1000s
• Napster and other sites were taken down
• Tracks uploaded to YouTube were taken down

By doing all this they were cutting down on the amount of people who downloaded song illegally but they also were losing customers. One example of this is that UMG had the internet providers send letters out to people illegally downloading, threatening to take away their internet. This worked well as 80% of people stopped doing it. But the internet providers didn't like doing this as they were losing paying customers by taking their internet away.

Labels everywhere are trying to keep up with the fast moving media and keep their audiences interested. Conglomerates are realising that they need to move with the times and provide ways for customers to enjoy their music while still maximising revenues. For example more streaming websites (spotify) will charge moderate subscription and share revenue with the labels.