Affects Digital Media has on the Entertainment Industry

One of the main sources of income that a band has in todays music industry is touring and merchandise sales (such as t-shirts, stickers, CDs etc.). I recently wrote a paper on Live Entertainment and discovered that new ways of viewing an artist live, outside of going to a show, have been in developing via online and pay per view options. At first I was like this is great but the more I started thinking about it, the a band is not going to be able to sell t-shirts or CDs nor will they make any money off the cover price of their shows. Granted it does allow your show to be viewed by a larger audience globally, the band still loses the ability to interact with their crowd and I know from my personal experiences that if I go see a band and have a chance to talk with them, I'm more likely to purchase some of their merch. All in all I can see the benefits but if the internet keeps providing us with everything, I feel we will continuely become lazier and we'll just sit in front of our computers all the time. What are your feeling on the subject?