Innovations in digital technology and creative destruction in the music industry

Abstract

The rapid growth of digital technologies has transformed the music industry world over from physical to digital. Creative destruction is a term introduced by Schumpeter to describe the dismantling of long-standing practices to make way for innovation. The present paper adopts the term creative destruction regarding the music industry to examine how innovations in the music industry from analogue to digital have increased productivity. The paper tries to examine whether the creative destruction of analogue technologies has paved the way for new digital formats of music. The paper with the aid of primary and secondary data explores the structural transformation in the music industry from physical to digital formats due to technological innovations in the context of the Indian music industry, which was one of the largest producers of music cassettes in the eighties.