Written Assessment Topic: discuss the impact of SoundCloud on the music industry Students will write an essay discussing and analysing the relationships between key music industry participants in a...

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Introduction
Not many businesses have seen the same degree of change as the music industry. Technology has changed every aspect of the industry: from how audio is processed and played, how it is purchased by buyers, to how artists can sell and distribute it. The streaming of files was nothing less than a revolution. It is possible to relate lessons from the music industry to many other industries that feel the influence of technology and changing customer habits. This paper aims at two of the businesses that have become more creative in the industry, and what has made them successful. The two companies are really very different beyond surface similarities and these are spotify and Sound Cloud.
Brief Overview: Sound Cloud
     At first, it is significant to note here that only after it has been given a buzzword can a phenomenon be legitimate, and when mass use of that buzzword starts to piss off the people most closely related to it, it becomes very real. One of these things is the word "SoundCloud rap," a description so common that it has come to feel like ad-agency shorthand, like "hipster" or "millennial” (Ketabchi, 2020). Artists and labels are, and for good reason, sick of this term. For one thing, it's no longer an apt descriptor; because most of the artists we're mentioning hardly have the chance to actually use the DIY streaming site until one of the aforementioned A&Rs snatches them up. For the sake of this storey, though, they are absurdist with imaginative names who may be more likely than Jay-Z or Biggie to worship Kurt Cobain and Marilyn Manson. Many of them choose to take drugs rather than sell them, unlike traditional street-oriented rap; they appear to wallow ostentatiously in their popularity instead of glorifying it (Ketabchi, 2020).
    Although Spotify was treading new ground, the company was competing with one of its closest competitors, SoundCloud, in a slightly different role. SoundCloud came very close to being forced to shut down. They had to collect $169.5 million in emergency funds (at a valuation of $150 million, sharply down from the previous valuation of $640 million raised by the company in 2014) from The Raine Group and Temasek, offering new, preferred shares to the new investors and cutting the old investors' liquidation preferences. The company had slashed jobs by 40 percent in the months before and was in negotiations for an acquisition by Spotify, which ended up falling apart. At that point, Spotify had refused three times to acquire SoundCloud (Ketabchi, 2020).
Critical Analysis and Historical Impressions
    Based on the above, it can be inferred that the success and market gain that SoundCloud music tradition has gained is something that relates back to Napster episode. Since the late 90s and the introduction of the internet, the music industry has undergone...