Disruptive Technologies

Technology is a constantly evolving industry. There are always things that replace what was previously being done as developers constantly work to improve on what was done before. These are called disruptive technologies, those that disrupt the current market's way of doing things. A very disruptive technology that has changed the world forever was the creation of peer-to-peer sharing on the internet, as it relates to the music industry. This technology was most famously made popular by the sharing giant, Napster. This technology disrupted the current flow of the music industries marketing plans of creating albums and selling them to the market.

In the creation of the peer-to-peer sharing, first becoming popular among colleges, the technology saw the large group of people who did not have much money to pay for an entire album of music, which was then around $18 compact discs being sold in most stores, like Sam Goody, FYE and other large retailers. This technology gave the power to listen to music prior to purchasing or actually forgoing the purchase all together for music from artists. As more and more students became involved with the sharing, the technology became more useful, as the computer made it very easy for people with the music already downloaded into their shared folders to allow for downloading to others. It gave people who looked at art as belonging to “the people”, however entirely ignoring the copyright laws in place to protect the intellectual property of the creators.

Looking to the Innovation and Commercialization Process, the initial technology concept started with the first peer to peer file sharing, would be the Napster concept of the central server based model (filesharingz.com, n.d.). This model was that in order to find a file, one had to search the Napster database itself. The file sharing technology went through changes over the years, and has now developed into what is currently being used by BitTorrent , the company that has taken the place of Napster in peer to peer file sharing, where the downloading is much more difficult to shut down than the first generation “Napster” concept. Due to the low need for funding for this project, mostly happening over the internet, the growth of the technology only needed people to help it grow, and most of these people were young students when beginning their projects in the early part of the 2000s. The companies who feel slighted by the growth of these peer to peer networks have constantly been trying to curb the disruption caused by these networks. For the past thirty to forty years has been the sale of the album, which this technology has now been instrumental in its decline. However, most of the speed bumps in the growth of these technologies have been the lawsuits and efforts by lawmakers to shut them down.

However, to overcome these speed bumps, there have been companies that use this type of technology to either develop new systems that preserve the copyright holders rights as well as meet the needs of the market. One such technology is iTunes, which has used a file sharing type of technology to sell music for slightly less than one dollar per song, and sometimes even for free. There are also other services like Spotify which uses peer to peer interaction to allow users to listen to music, talk about it and purchase. In conclusion, these types of technologies are emerging and making the music industry drastically different than the virtual monopoly that stood from the 60s – the 90s. What would be the most useful file sharing technology that could be created that could assist in the re-establishment of the album as the dominant product of the music industry?



References:

FilesharingZ. (n.d.). Filesharing History. Retrieved from
http://filesharingz.com/guides/filesharing-history.php
Schroeder, J. (June 30, 2011). Wiki Article “Peer-To-Peer File Sharing”. History 250.
Retrieved from http://history.msu.edu/hst250/2011/06/30/wiki-article-peer-to-peer-file-sharing/
Allen, K. (2007). Growing and managing a small business: An entrepreneurial perspective (2nd
ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.