Even as of 2003 the Punjabi music industry in India was facing a severe crisis due to the flooding of the market with CDs that are pirated and this has eroded the revenue of major music companies in India. This had resulted in the major companies withdrawing their efforts in entering in to any new projects as the pirated CDs were selling at one third of the original prices. Such sales had taken a serious proportion in which 50 to 70 percent of the total music industry was thriving on the pirated CDs.
The magnitude of the menace is such that any new release of the music CDs will be copied and would be available in the market within 4 to 5 hours of the release there of. Due to the attractively lower prices at which the pirated CDs were made available the customers could not contain their temptation to buy pirated products and save money by buying the cheaper products. This had made many big music companies to form raiding teams to control the piracy of their products.
The attractiveness of the pirated products is added by recording the hits of 10 or more singers in to one single MP3 and the CD was being sold at less than USD 0. 50 cents. This had greatly affected the sale of genuine products. This had even made the singers to set up their own music companies to protect their products, Even though the objective of the research was to assess the impact of the internet on the Indian Punjabi industry, due to the general nature of the music worldwide any issues that affect the music industry worldwide would become equally applicable to the Indian Punjabi industry.
Moreover when the research is just centered around the Indian Punjabi music industry the study would suffer a serious limitation of limiting the concept of internet marketing to a very confined subject of Indian Punjabi music which may not be substantiated with statistical and other information due to lack of resources. Hence it is chosen to deal with the subject in more general terms as the internet affects the music industry as a whole.
Hence any reference to the general music industry should be deemed to have made a reference to the Indian Punjabi music industry as basically the Indian Punjabi industry has all the characteristics of the world music industry. Hence the research conducted may be construed as the research relating to the Indian Punjabi music industry. This chapter presents a detailed explanation of the methodology which will be used in conducting this research… This chapter will illustrate the reader about research methods and the relative merits and demerits. The objective of this research will be achieved using both qualitative and quantitative methods.
The research also follows a survey through a questionnaire constructed on the basis of the review of the literature and circulated to select samples The research presented in this paper will be based on a positivist epistemology and an objective ontology. The reason for the above mentioned philosophical stance is that data collected in this research will not contain any of the researcher’s personal perceptions. The required data for the thesis will be obtained from factual information of the impact of internet on the Indian Punjabi music obtained during the research period, so an objective ontology is appropriate for this research.
Ontology is actually an orientation or set of assumptions about the nature of reality that has a role in a hypothetical zone (Neumann 2003). Two competing ontological positions are common. The first of the two approaches is related to the conceiving of problems, phenomena and methods in objective terms i. e. , the perspective is being held through an external viewpoint. The second approach depends on subjective terms, while conceiving of the problems, phenomena and methods with an internal perspective (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000).