How Limewire Changed The Music Industry
Deon Egenti
I will never forgive people for putting that Bill Clinton confession video in songs I wanted to download. Anyways, if you had a computer at your house, a fan of music, and you were a pre-teen or teenager in the mid-2000s, then you have used Limewire before. Unless you had an allowance or a job, people around that age were not buying music. I remember vividly how I would search for hours trying to find the hottest new songs from my favorite artists. I would transfer them to Windows Media Player, burn them to a CD, and have my own little mix. It was the way I consumed music besides watching BET after school. It changed the way people consumed music for better or for worse. As much as I loved using it as a kid, I had no idea how it negatively impacted the music industry.
The Guardian reported: “According to RIAA figures, US recorded music sales fell to $7.7 billion in 2009 from $14.5 billion in 1999. The rise to prominence of peer-to-peer filesharing networks is singled out as a primary factor for this decline by the RIAA. The site’s popularity is reflected in a survey by NDP Group, which found that LimeWire was used by 58% of people who have downloaded music from a peer-to-peer network in the year from May 2009.” Although Limewire wasn’t the first to do it, they were one of the biggest since Napster. It practically cost the music industry hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
Limewire gave people around my age access to get music for free. It gave us joy and it got us in trouble all at the same time. If you did not get a virus on your computer by being on Limewire, then you weren’t living right. Of course, there were many other file sharing services that came such as Mediafire, Hulkshare, Bearshare, etc., but Limewire was the one that raised us. It prepared us for what the music industry had in store for everyone down the line. We live in a time where the streaming era is now how we consume music. No one is going to FYE, Best Buy, or your local music store to buy CDs anymore. We can get as much music as we want by just tapping a few buttons with our hands. If we’re really looking at it, isn’t this all the same thing? According to a year-end report from the RIAA, revenues from streaming services grew nearly 20% in 2019 to $8.8 billion, accounting for 79.5% of all recorded music revenues. Although these are strong numbers, artists, publishers, and writers suffer challenges on how to get income from streaming. It’s all the same game, but we just get charged monthly for it. Napster was the beginning, Limewire was the middle, and I don’t know if streaming is the end. However, it’s the continuation of how the digital world has changed music.
