Abstract
Since 10 years, the music industry knew a deep period of crisis. There are several reasons : the new opportunities provided by Internet, the changes in the way of listening music, the price of DVD, etc ... But if the environment and the market evolved, the industry stayed inactive. When the sales of compact discs began to decrease, the majors didn't ask themselves if it was the time of change.
All the markets follow the life's curb of the products, but the music industry didn't. The compact disc, compare to the uses of the consumers, didn't feet anymore. During this period, the piracy was the only answers to the decrease that the majors found. If it accelerated for sure the death of the compact discs, it was not the only reason.
Internet has changed the relationship between consumers and music. All the elements of the market changed. There were new entrants :
- New competitors (for instance, which imposed innovative contracts with artists as Live Nation);
- A different kind of distributors on Internet (I-tunes, Emusic, etc ... which modified the way of buying music, the consumer can buy only one track on a album;
- A change about the suppliers with more dematerializations (because Internet and the new formats of exchange such as the mp3's); we can also consider the video games as a kind of product of substitution (many new video games give the possibility to "play" instruments and "make" music).
