The rise of digital music industry had created changes in the lives of music fans all over the world. It had brought both positive and negative impact. One of the effects of the growing digital music industry was the plunge of the independent music stores.
Recently, in line with the growing number of top acts who goes to exclusive deals on the release of their albums, scores of Independent Music stores in the United States had written an open letter for two of U.S top performers and artists who are about to release new tracks, Jay Z and Kanye West.
The two had inked an exclusive deal between iTunes and Best Buy for their new tracks. Prior to that deal, the signatories of the letter expressed their call for equality in the access and releasing of the albums.
If the exclusive deal will be pursued, it will give the two mentioned digital music publisher an edge of two weeks on the sales since they will be given the advance privilege of selling the albums compared to the independent music stores.
As stated in the open letter, they said that the exclusive deal will definitely create “great damage”. There are more than 1700 record stores spreading across the U.S and as part of the foreseen damage to the business of independent music store industry, some of the signatories and store owners had revealed that they might be forced to pull out the albums of Jay Z and Kanye West out from their storage and shelves as the counter reaction.
Furthermore, other big names in the music industry in the U.S just like Billboard had also expressed their disagreement and open criticisms to such move.
As reported via bbc.com, Billboard predicted that in just 10 days, it might happened that 75% of the demand for the albums will be satisfied.
The move of the independent music stores is expected to draw attention as they continue to ask equal access to albums to be released so that their business will not be totally dumped upon the rise of digital counterpart.