Music is one of the fastest growing industry's, however the once ever popular CD is gone. People no longer rush out to buy the latest single or album of Justin Timberlake, instead it's all about downloading it on to their itunes. People are able to downloading music and sending it to their phones as their latest phone tone or putting it on their own CD's to give to friends. It as had a huge impact on the way music is funded and financed. This means that companies such as Virgin, Woolworths due to the lose of sales severely struggled to keep up, and as a result went busted. Big music stores such as HMV no longer sell singles and the Music charts are mainly based on downloads.
In relation to networking sites, in my experience many bands through the likes of BEBO set up the own web pages in order to encourage fans and also post their latest news and most importantly their upcoming performance dates. There can also put music players on their pages which they can download their music on to for people looking at the page to listen to. Its also a free source which means its a great way to endorse themselves and perhaps 'make it' by breaking through into the music industry.
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