Beck is a DIY artist, which means that he creates his songs him self, although he never records them. Beck releases sheet music to his fans and in exchange for the song he receives many different versions of that same song as it is up to the audience how they interpret it. This is why Beck relies strongly on social networking to become known, his niche community of fans are all musically talented as they play his songs themselves and upload them to sites like YouTube and Twitter to try and gain interest from other fans or Beck himself as he has his own Songreader website where he picks the best interpretations of the songs and adds them to an online album for the world to see. This way of working has lead Beck to have a relationship with his audience and create a dedicated fanbase.
Although Beck writes his own music he doesn't ever make a visual for this piece leaving the music video side of things down to his fans, this means that Beck wouldn't be known without his fans creating videos to post on social networking sites. This shows that in order to consume Beck's music you wither have to play it yourself or listen to it through social networking sites such as YouTube, again showing that the internet has a huge impact on Beck's career more than anything else.
The way in which Beck works is completely different to any Major record label. For example Sony is a conglomerate company and owns multiple cross media institutions world wide. Syco is one of Sony's off spring of smaller record labels which is the label One Direction, the worlds biggest selling boy band, are signed to. One direction became famous through the xfactor and ended up with a Syco record deal. Unlike Beck, Xfactor focuses strongly on visualisation and every week will put on a different show to see whats popular, they use this as a marketing campaign as every week the artist will have a different look to see what image the audience like best, as every week people vote for their favourite act. Major labels have also taken advantage of the internet side of digital development as they use itunes to sell their music and make money from it, an example of this would again be Xfactor, the songs that the acts sing on the night are immediately released on itunes, so before that artist is even signed or become famous the audience is big enough that the Major label makes money through them from things like itunes and spotify. This shows that although Major labels dominate the music industry because of the amount of money that they make and the amount of business they own they still use the development of technology to spread their songs as the internet has become more popular and a part of every day life, this way although they already have a world wide audience spreading music across the internet and TV, this is an example of synergy and shows that they need this to reach other fans and create a wider community of people.
Similarly to Beck, prosumers are fans that create things like mashups and covers of songs by artists that they enjoy, they use apps and computer software to mashup songs to create a new song, sometimes the mashup will sound good as it uses old music in new ways, an example of translation; but can be considered bad as the music is usually illegally downloaded from sites such as YouTube converters and pirate sites, making it not pure. Prosumers would not be able to exist without the use of the internet, they rely on it to download their songs, create their sings and distribute it; similar to Beck. Prosumers are usually teenagers that enjoy music and therefore they believe that they have a right to get that music for free, this puts pressure on the music industry as a whole as people are no longer paying for songs so they are therefore loosing money, this could mean that the use of social networking sites to distribute music could be putting a strain on the industry as well as helping it.
So to conclude I think that digital distribution is a huge part of the consumption and marketing of the music industry and many people would be unknown without it.
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