After months in the works Byta is releasing a Whitepaper on The State of Music Sharing. This research report is the first of its kind to examine the current challenges faced daily when sharing digital audio files and streams across the music ecosystem.
In the world of music, few practices are more widespread than the sharing of digital audio files and streams. Whether you’re a professional musician, a casual hobbyist or one of the countless people working behind the scenes in the industry, it’s a near certainty that part of what you do involves sending or receiving files—and in many cases, both.
If you get a few music professionals together in a room and ask them about file sharing, they’ll quickly start rattling off complaints about everything from poorly designed interfaces and wobbly security measures to inconvenient file formats and missing metadata.
The industry needs something better, and that’s why Byta has elected to take action. Earlier this year, we conducted a wide-ranging, academically crafted survey of musicians and music professionals from around the globe. Collecting and compiling information was our starting point, and by analyzing survey responses, we’ve sought to build a coherent, data-backed snapshot of the larger file-sharing landscape—and properly diagnose some of its inherent challenges.
The resulting Whitepaper is authored by Barcelona-based freelance writer and editor Shawn Reynaldo, who is also responsible for First Floor, a newsletter devoted to electronic music. The project was developed in partnership with researcher Dr. John Sullivan (Ph.D. Music Technology, McGill University, Canada).