British pop singer Adele's refusal to allow her new record to be released or streamed online has sparked confusion to the international music industry.
According to Reuters, the pop singer wants to adopt the conventional method of selling her record through a CD or paid download before allowing it to be streamed online.
One of the music industry observers described her actions as "dumb" for delaying the streaming this upcoming Holiday season. Apple Inc. and Spotify have confirmed to their followers that the "25" Album will not be available on their streaming services.
The conventional music industry is facing a problem in terms of revenue. People have become reliant to the internet-delivered music to the extent that it becomes the fastest-growing source of income. Online streaming services sparks complain from most artists who are recieving low royalty rates. Hence, instead of relying on their albums and streaming rates, they opt to do live performances to gain more income.
Despite Adele's announcement of her first tour in five years, she opted not to do live performances and focus on maximizing her sales. Adele, together with her advisers, implemented pragmatism by releasing her first single album for streaming to attract interest to the album. This strategy was demonstrated to drive up old music buyers to purchase CDs than to stream online.
The thing is, with or without Adele's sales, the conventional music industry is still in trouble. Statistics show that the US sales of CDs have started to deteriorate from 767 million in 2004 to 141 million in 2014.
On the other hand, sales albums which are available online have increased from 4.6 million to 117.6 million on the same period of time. People prefer to do streaming and downloading than purchasing the album. Streaming services become the number one threat in the music industry. This is a big challenge that the music industry and the artists have to face.
Nowadays, it's hard to persuade people to buy your album. In order to sell records, musicians and artist have to engage with their audiences through live performances. As with Adele, choosing the conventional way of selling her album shows much support to the music industry.
