Going Digital

Since the turn of the millennium, however, CD sales have gone downhill. That’s due to a number of factors, including a dearth of talent and an increasing fragmentation of genres. But probably the most significant reason for the slide in sales of physical music product is the shift to virtual products—digital music downloaded from the Internet.

With the rise of the Internet in the late 1990s, music lovers found they could download the songs they wanted from a variety of legitimate and illegitimate websites. The original Napster was one of the first of the free file-sharing websites, encouraging listeners to rip music from their compact discs and upload the tracks to the web, where they could then be downloaded (for free) by others. Napster was eventually shut down for illegal file sharing, but the public developed a taste for downloading single tracks (not complete albums) over the Internet in MP3 format.