INDUSTRY: Smartphone Consumption

I did some research into smartphone consumption within the music industry, how smartphones are the means of consumption of music. I found an article on telegraph.co.uk. 

With the smartphone, you can download a song in seconds, purchase tickets to a concert and upload concert footage to social media. Ever since Thomas Edison played back the very first strains of recorded sound on the mechanical phonograph cylinder in 1877, people have been finding ways to make listening and consuming music more convenient. The smartphone was the solution. In less than 20 years, phones have firstly, replaced record shopping. Many years ago before streaming came about, people had to go to a shop and buy a piece of plastic with music on it. Even once the iPod came along, it was a case of "ripping" a CD onto your computer and then uploading it to your device. When the Itunes store came about, this removed the CD element - but you still needed to get onto a computer. But due to the smartphone evolution, this process of going on Itunes on a computer went away. Now, we can stream any track or song that exists using Spotify, YouTube and a 4G or Wi-Fi connection. And if we want to own these tracks, you can buy MP3s just as easily through Itunes or by ripping videos from YouTube using ripping sites. 

Secondly, smartphones have made us music geniuses. Now, when you hear a song anywhere you go which you like but don't know the name of or have never heard before, you can use Shazam to identify songs within seconds (as long as you have internet). All you have to do is hold your phone up so it can listen to the track playing and then it tells you the name of the track. 

Music apps such as Spotify, Tidal and Apple Music offer specially curated playlists to help you find songs which you really like. Some of these lists are created by algorithms, some by real people. 

You can also listen to music through Radio on your smartphone, for example you can download the app 'Capital Fm' on the app store. It helps you keep up to date with the latest chart hits. Also, the rise of podcasts has also allowed niche interests to flourish; there are podcasts for every imaginable genre of music.

Thirdly, smartphones have stopped us getting lost at festivals. Going to festivals and concerts is a much less stressful experience now ever since the evolution of the smartphone. There are apps that can help you find your tent, Twitter accounts to keep you posted on secret gigs, GPS to help you navigate the festival site and text messages to ask your friends where they are or where to meet. 

Though the digitisation of music makes it harder for some artists to make money selling songs, the live show has become very important. And with the smartphone, people no longer have to sit by a landline hitting redial every three seconds in the hope of getting gig tickets; now people can use apps such as Dice or Getty to buy tickets on the go. 

Many ticket sellers have replaced having a paper ticket when you go to gigs to just being able to flash a QR code on your smartphone to enter the gig. 

Also, after having personal experience of this myself, it is not unusual to watch the majority of a gig through the phone screen of the person in front of you. Some music fans  (majorly the younger generation - teens and children) are more invested in cataloguing the show for Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter than in actually watching the thing live. Not many arms are thrown in the air at gigs now without a phone clutched in them. 


Some artists really don’t agree to the number of phones being waved or held up during shows; the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Wilco are 2 examples of artist that have put up signs at venues asking the crowd to keep their camera phones in their pockets, while Alicia Keys and Guns N’ Roses have gone a step further and insisted on people having locked phone pouches that can only be unlocked when the show is over.

But other artists are a bit more up for this technological progression, by asking fans to hold up their phones with their flash on during emotional power ballads.