Benefits of P2P on the Music Industry

Although Napster and several subsequent P2P (peer-to-peer) sharing applications were generally viewed as threats to the music industry, they did provide potential economic benefits to the industry as well. Programs such as Napster and Limewire revolved around users sharing their own files with other users, which effectively cut down the music industry's ability to monopolize their sales, as people could now find the songs for free. However, the music industry was able to recover from this situation and in some cases actually benefitted from the rise of P2P sharing.

The music industry had to adapt to the rise of digital music, and as the number of physical sales declined, the industry switched to an economic model based around royalties. Rather than making massive profits from being able to sell the same song multiple times, labels were able to monetize songs and make digital music services need licenses to distribute the label's songs. This allowed the digitalization of music to continue growing with technological advances rather than stagnating or being forcibly reverted to physical CDs and vinyl records to prevent people from being able to download music. The rise of P2P brought a new age of music distribution for music labels.

In addition, the rise of P2P gave many new artists an entry point into the music industry without needing the same connections within the industry that artists had previously required. The P2P system allowed for much greater artist recognition and allowed music listeners to greatly expand their collection of music, so more artists could potentially sell their music to the general public.

P2P also allowed for the rise of some artists, with one notable case being Soulja Boy. The artist came to popularity through P2P, as he infamously shared his song "Crank That" on programs such as Limewire by changing the file name to songs that were popular at the time, in order to trick people into downloading and listening to his music. P2P allowed for artists to become big names with far less work than what had been necessary before.

The rise of P2P came with many drawbacks to the music industry but it ultimately had some positive effects as well.

Sources:
http://mcpress.media-commons.org/piracycrusade/chapter-4-dissecting-the-boogeyman-how-bad-is-p2p-anyway/economic-and-social-benefits-of-p2p/
http://www.angelfire.com/de3/jfreeman/termpaper.htm#Benefits
https://wiux.org/read/hip-hop-history-soulja-boy-trolls-limewire/