How music is distributed

The distribution of music is very different to ten years ago. The new ways of distributing music definitely makes accessing music much easier as the only way used to be to buy the CD from a shop, however now we can easily purchase a MP3 straight to our computers to place straight onto an MP3 Player/Ipod. To demonstrate the different ways a artist would distribute their music, I am going to focus on one artist in the same genre as my own song, Rihanna, and her album 'Rated R'.

The Website for Rihanna is very simple, and there is a clear section that says 'Shop' which leads you to a sub-website where they sell all of Rihanna's albums as well as merchandise such as mugs, signed posters and T-shirts. Although this form of purchasing an album is very costly, it is definitely official.

ITunes is the new hype which has revolutionised the way the public purchases CD's and MP3's. This new way of downloading MP3's is a great way to directly buy songs straight onto a Ipod which is also a major trend. This of course has limitations. Because of the huge amount of traffic for marketing which comes to iTunes, the cost per song does tend to be high. 

Amazon MP3 is also another way of purchasing MP3's directly. The pricing strategies of Amazon MP3 is aimed much lower than iTunes, although probably not as popular. The price for the album here is 3.99 compared to a staggering 6.99 on iTunes.

A very new form of buying music is also through retail brands which are now opening web downloading stores such as Tesco. Tesco also would sell the album in store for a competitive price for the physical album, however now they are competing with Amazon, iTunes and many more such as HMV and Zavvi.

After researching the different types of ways music similar to my own gets distributed, I feel that I now know more about the kind of industry and competitiveness in pricing there really is. It will help for when I come to create my magazine advert, I know who i'm pitching the advert to.