Modern information technologies in the music industry

Statement of the problem. The article studies the range of issues related to the activities of music creators in today’s conditions and the effects of objective and subjective factors caused by radical changes in sound recording technology on the one hand, and the demands the consumer market on the other. Today, the vast majority of music distributed in the world is digital. The Internet has changed not only the ways in which music is consumed, but also the volume of that consumption (Cakebread, 2017) and even the music itself (Dredge, 2013). The situation is impressive: according to statistics for 2020 (Friedlander, 2021), in the music market of the United States of America, streaming services have already reached the level of 83%, while sales of physical media, CDs, are several times inferior to this figure. However, despite the dominance of digital music content, sales of vinyl records have maintained an upward trend in recent years (Savage, 2016). Objectives, methods, and novelty of the research. Attention is focused not only on the technologies used to record and distribute music. The conditions in which all participants in the process of creating and listening to modern music find themselves today, both consumers and those who are “on the other side” – musicians, sound engineers, music producers, whose activities have undergone significant changes under the influence of development digital technologies, also required its discussions. The purpose and novelty of our research is to draw the attention of a wide audience to the problems that exist today in the activities of specialists involved in the process of creating musical sound recordings. Research results. The causes and consequences of the so-called “loudness war”, which began in the mid-nineties by dividing music recordings into “old” and “new” music, are considered. The signal level in older recordings of music has “gaps”, waves, peaks and dips, and this reflects the mood swings inherent in the person, which are conveyed in the music. Today’s commercially successful soundtracks are an almost flat signal line at maximum volume all the time, where every hit of the bass drum only pushes this level further into the red sector. The result is something “flat” and lifeless, compared to which “old” music seems to “breathe” more freely and constantly change. It is amazing, that this practice of sound processing still continues, despite the extensive capabilities of digital technology to minimize sound distortion and the growing popularity of streaming services such as Spotify and others, where volume normalization is enabled by default. It is sad, that major labels – sound recording studios – promote this kind of product and, at the same time, suppress the work of art, making recordings colorless and uninteresting. Conclusion. The circle of people involved in the creation of a musical product has expanded significantly, but unfortunately this expansion has occurred at the expense of an increase in the number of intermediate links in the overall chain on the path from the composer and performers to the finished phonogram that reaches the consumer market. At the same time, the total number of those production chains for the creation of musical products has radically reduced, leading to the formation of monopolies. This process began in the mid-1990s, and monopolization hit rock music most acutely, leading to its noticeable decline, however, other musical genres also suffered certain consequences.