Music industry

The music industry (or music business) sells compositions, recordings and
performances of music. Among the many individuals and organizations that
operate within the industry are the musicians who compose and perform the
music; the companies and professionals who create and sell recorded music
(e.g., music publishers, producers, studios, engineers, record labels, retail
and online music stores, performance rights organisations); those that
present live musicperformances (booking agents, promoters, music venues, road
crew); professionals who assist musicians with their careers (talent
managers, business managers,entertainment lawyers); those who broadcast
music (satellite and broadcast radio); journalists; educators; musical
instrument manufacturers; as well as many others.
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the music industry was
dominated by the publishers of sheet music. By mid-century records had
supplanted sheet music as the largest player in the music business: in the
commercial world people began speaking of "the recording industry" as a loose
synonym of "the music industry". Since 2000, sales of recorded music have
dropped off substantially,
[1]
while live music has increased in importance.
[2]
Four
"major corporate labels" dominate recorded music Universal Music
Group, Sony Music Entertainment,
[3]
Warner Music Group and EMI each of
which consists of many smaller companies and labels serving different regions
and markets. The live music industry is dominated byLive Nation, the largest
promoter and music venue owner. Live Nation is a former subsidiary of Clear
Channel Communications, which is the largest owner of radio stations in the
United States. Other important music industry companies includeCreative Artists
Agency (a management and booking company) and Apple Inc. (which is stated as
of 2009 of running the world's largest Internet based music store, theiTunes
Store).
In response to the rise of widespread illegal file sharing, the record industry took
aggressive legal action. In 2001 it succeeded in shutting down Napster, and
threatened legal action against thousands of individuals who participated.[16]
However, this failed to slow the decline in revenue and proved a public-relations
disaster.[16] Some academic studies have even suggested that downloads did not
cause the decline.[18] Legal digital downloads became widely available with the
debut of the iTunes Store in 2003. The popularity of internet music distribution
has increased and by 2012 digital music sales topped physical sales of music.[19]
However, as The Economist reports, "paid digital downloads grew rapidly, but did
not begin to make up for the loss of revenue from CDs."[15] The 2008 British
Music Rights survey[20] showed that 80% of people in Britain wanted a legal P2P
service, however only half of the respondents thought that the music's creators
should be paid. The survey was consistent with the results of earlier research
conducted in the United States, upon which the Open Music Model was
based.[21]
The turmoil in the recorded music industry changed the twentieth-century
balance between artists, record companies, promoters, retail music-stores and
the consumer. As of 2010, big-box stores such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy sell more
records than music-only stores, which have ceased to function as a player in the
industry. Recording artists now rely on live performance and merchandise for the
majority of their income, which in turn has made them more dependent on music
promoters like Live Nation (which dominates tour promotion and owns a large
number of music venues).[4] In order to benefit from all of an artist's income
streams, record companies increasingly rely on the "360 deal", a new business-
relationship pioneered by Robbie Williams and EMI in 2007.[22] At the other
extreme, record companies can offer a simple manufacturing and distribution
deal, which gives a higher percentage to the artist, but does not cover the
expense of marketing and promotion. Many newer artists no longer see a record
deal as an integral part of their business plan at all. Inexpensive recording
hardware and software made it possible to record reasonable quality music in a
bedroom and distribute it over the internet to a worldwide audience.[23] This, in
turn, caused problems for recording studios, record producers and audio
engineers: the Los Angeles Times reports that as many as half of the recording
facilities in that city have failed.[24] Changes in the music industry have given
consumers access to a wider variety of music than ever before, at a price that
gradually approaches zero.[16] However, consumer spending on music-related
software and hardware increased dramatically over the last decade, providing a
valuable new income-stream for technology companies such as Apple Inc. As of
now, consumers are witnessing the beginning of the end for record labels.
Services such as Pandora, Spotify, and Apples iTunes Radio hasten the death of
the modern music industry with their pay to stream services. However, the
industry is not just dying from how music is formatted and distributed, but also
from increasingly inexpensive audio recording equipment and the help of the
Internet to distribute self-produced albums. Companies like Kickstarter help
independent musicians produce their albums through fans funding bands they
want to listen to.[25]

Upbeat
Dec 27th 2013, The Economist


The music industry will see better times in 2014
THE internet has always been the enemy of music executives. It facilitates piracy, dents CD
sales and encourages people to download single songs instead of buying them by the dozen. But
it will give executives something to sing about in 2014. Subscription services such as Spotify,
which allow users to stream music for a monthly fee or in exchange for listening to
advertisements, will add listeners. So will online-radio services like Pandora. And more digital-
music firms will be launched. The spread of smartphones and unlimited-data plans will make
these portable music services more attractive to listeners. Streaming is still a small part of the
music business globally, but will bolster it in the years ahead. Like a popular rocker who burns
out, only to try to stage a comeback a decade later, the sickly music industry will probably never
regain its previous vigour. But even modest growth is welcome news.

Better times for the music industry
Nov 18th 2013 |


Music executives, known for pouring more of their attention into parties than balance-sheets,
have had to become more professional about running leaner businesses. In 2014 record labels
and bands will use new tools to sell and share their tunes. It will become more common for
bands and managers to use data about where fans are listening to them in order to decide where
to tour. More start-ups will get going in 2014 and disrupt the normal way of doing things.
SongKick, a London firm, lets fans enter credit-card details and pledge to buy a concert ticket for
their favourite band if they will perform in their town. These guaranteed ticket sales mean smaller
artists can do shows that would otherwise be too risky.
Concerts and festivals will still be a booming business, particularly for star singers. However,
some record executives privately confess their concern about the industrys reliance on a few
big, older names to sell tickets. Many of the biggest draws today, such as the Rolling Stones, are
ageing. With luck a more upbeat 2014 will bring the discovery of some new musical acts, whose
popularity lasts longer than a few albumor digitaltracks.
Alexandra Suich: media editor, The Economist

The music industry
Learning how to play
Dec 13th 2013, The Economist
It has been a tough decade for the music industry, but some are beginning to hear a
happier tune. Employment for musicians is growing due to increased demand for live
performances. The average hourly wage for musicians is now around $22, well more
than the countrywide average of $16.
A 2012 Berklee College of Music report found that the average personal income of
more than 5,000 surveyed musicians was $55,561, which is higher than the national
average of nearly $43,000. (More than half of the surveyed musicians work at least
three jobs, and income from musical work, such as compositions, recordings and
performances, accounts for roughly 80% of take-home pay.) The industry also
has several niche growth areas, including startups, video games to music therapy.
"It makes me very hopeful for our musicians here and what they can do," said Peter
Spellman, director of Berklee's Career Development Center, to Forbes. "But it does
require a certain amount of business savvy and marketing savvy, in combination with
your musical savvy, to succeed."
To arm musicians with some of this savvy, a handful of American universities are
now teaching courses designed to help students get ahead in an evolving industry.
In programmes at Berklee; the University of California, Los Angeles; Belmont
University in Nashville; the University of Southern California; and Syracuse
University in upstate New York, among other places, musicians, recording
engineers, tour managers and industry executives teach classes in marketing,
promotion, social media, technology and entrepreneurship.
At Syracuse University students learn to judge artist photos and mobile apps, and
deconstruct artist and publishing contracts. They read trade publications such
as Billboardmagazine, and research concert ticket-payment services. They build
business plans and run music companies on campus that promote concerts and
coordinate merchandising. Students are often musically inclined, but their musical
endeavours are extracurricular.
Ulf Oesterle, who runs the Syracuse program, often pairs student projects with
brands such as Bushmills Irish whiskey, which are increasingly interested in entering
the music business. His students recently collaborated with Converse, a trainer
company. Companies including Red Bull, Yamaha, Mountain Dew, Scion (a car
manufacturer), and Adult Swim (a cable network) have launched their own in-house
record labels.
Many of Mr Oesterle's first-year students say they want to work at a music label, but
such jobs are scarce. They are more likely to land roles in music publishing and artist
management, or work in video gaming, music startups or music therapy. "I had a
meeting yesterday with a student who has an incredible live-music app idea," says
Mr Oesterle. "He does it here, where he can fail, where it's not his job on the line."
Musicians continue to struggle to get royalties, so Gigi Johnson, executive director at
the Maremel Institute, a California-based media consultant, spends a lot of time
teaching students how to exploit social-media data to make more informed decisions
about marketing music to fans.
"Some of my music students have 50,000 YouTube fans, but don't know what to do
with them," Ms Johnson said. She teaches her students how to discern the
"psychographics" of fans from back-end diagnostics: where do fans hang out? How
do they see themselves, and where do they eat? This data can be used to create
targeted sponsorship campaigns with specific brands, she says.
Drew Taggart enrolled in the Bandier program at Syracuse because he thought he
wanted to be like Ari Gold, the fast-talking agent from the television show
"Entourage". But he realised he had no patience to climb what he perceived to be a
"long brewing trip to the top" of industry management. Instead he formed a DJ duo
called The Chainsmokers, which creates techno remixes of songs from indie bands.
Through a massive e-mail campaign to labels, bookers and bloggers, The
Chainsmokers secured plenty of New York City club gigs and began touring
worldwide.
"The music industry is strange," said Mr Taggart. "Creative people I meet have this
false mentality that if they make the best song in the world, everyone will listen. That
isn't true. You need an audience to get you to that place. And it's tedious work."

Difference Engine
Instruments of mass delight
Oct 13th 2013, by N.V. | LOS ANGELES, The Economist
To learn to play a musical instrument requires students to sharpen their cognitive and
psychomotor skills, and, most importantly, to hone their affective abilitiesin particular, their
sensitivity to mood and emotion. Meanwhile, their ears have to become attuned to not just pitch,
but also to a sound's timbre and timing. Computer programs are not good at such things.

In many ways, learning to play an instrument is like learning a foreign language. And like
language, music is what distinguishes humans from the rest of the animal world. Yes, birds
singoften exquisitely so to human earsbut it is still mere chatter among the flock. People
make music because they want to convey their inner-most feelings, not just signal their presence
or immediate needs.

As with language, it is easier to learn to play an instrument when a childwhile the brain is still
plastic enough for extra connections to be built between the auditory, visual and motor regions.
Brain scans of musicians who learned music at an early age reveal accumulations of white
matter in the corpus callosuma bundle of nerve fibres that connect the motor regions of the
brains right and left hemispheres. When tested, such people are way above average at
synchronising their limbs with cues from their eyes and ears.

That does not mean teaching children music at an early age will boost their IQs and improve their
performance at school generally, as was once widely believed. The so-called Mozart effect
the suggestion that children taking music lessons will also garner some generalised educational
benefithas been thoroughly debunked by researchers at the University of Toronto as a
complete waste of time. Children studying music tend to do well at school for social, not
cognitive, reasons. Typically, they come from homes where parents have had more education,
have higher incomes and have greater expectations than average. Put another way, high-
achieving kids take music lessons.

Nor does this mean adults cannot learn to play an instrument and excel. It just requires more
perseverance and patience. Indeed, it is often prescribed for the elderly, because it stimulates
areas of the brain associated with hearing and memorytwo of the faculties most commonly
impaired by the ravages of time.

As a musician, you get very good at pulling out important information from a complex
soundscape, says Nina Kraus, a neurobiology professor at Northwestern University in Evanston,
Illinois. That involves hearing, but is [also] related to how quickly you can process information,
and how well you remember it. Interviewed by ABC News, Dr Kraus noted it is not enough
merely to listen to musicjust as no-one will get fit through watching spectator sports. It is the
intensity of the effort required to perform a piece of music that helps keep memory and hearing
sharp.

As Babbages own memory has begun to falter and his hearing has become less acute, he, too,
has considered making music again. The lapse has been too long to pick up where he left off
playing violin and trumpet in an ensemble half a lifetime ago. The challenge would be to take up
something different. He rather fancies the cello. With the compass of the human voice, it speaks
directly to the player's own inner-earan instrument, indeed, to have a personal converation
with.

After years of toiling at the piano as well as brass and fiddle, the advice he would normally offer a
novice studying music for the first time would be to avoid instruments that do not have natural
harmonics, or frets or keys to aid the fingers. It is easy to get a sound (at least, a screech) out of
a stringed instrument like a violin, but rather hard to get the exact note required, let alone a clear
and steady tone. It takes practice and a good ear to be able to move the fingers fluently to their
correct positions on the unmarked fingerboard. By contrast, a guitar, ukulele or banjo have
defined finger positions (frets), which make them easier for beginners.

Like other brass instruments, a trumpet has natural harmonics and valves to create the notes in
between. Here, the main difficulty is not fingering, but developing an embouchurethe muscles
at the side of the mouth that pull the vibrating lips tighter (or looser) to produce a higher (or
lower) frequency in the mouthpiece. Once the knack is acquired, though, the muscle memory
lasts a lifetime. Rather than a trumpet, a cornet makes a better instrument to start on, producing
a softer, warmer sound that neighbours will appreciate. Of the wind instruments, the clarinet, flute
or recorder are obvious candidates, especially the last because of its simple construction and
modest price.

And the piano? Of course. After the organ, it is quite the most majestic and orchestral of
instruments. Producing notes, lots of them, presents little difficulty. But playing the piano adroitly
does require the brain to do a significant amount of parallel-processing to synchronise the
actions of two hands and two feet with signals coming from eyes and ears. Learning to play a
nursery rhyme may take only minutes, but becoming proficient at the piano involves literally
thousands of hours of practice.

Remember also that reading piano music requires the eyes to track simultaneously the notes on
two separate staves, one for each hand. (Organ music uses three staves: one for each hand and
one for the feet.) Accomplished musiciansand pianists, in particulartend to read ahead
slightly, processing and storing the notes to be played in their short-term memory before actually
playing them. Studio musicians, who are expected to play music they have never seen or heard
before without a rehearsal, sight-read several seconds ahead.

So, how can technology help the would-be musician? The best thing about web services and
iPad music apps, in particular, is that they can inspire people to take the plunge, especially those
who might otherwise be put off by the thought of years of tedious practice. The best learning
algorithms make the experience funwith all the challenges, rewards, encouragements,
reinforcements and confidence-building tricks computer games have mustered over the years.
Most can be downloaded from iTunes or found elsewhere on the web.

For the piano, youngsters should check out Piano Dust Buster 2. A better choice for adults may
be Learn Piano HD with its 27 video lessons. For the guitar, a useful website is JamPlay, a
subscription service that provides streaming video lessons, with live chats with music teachers,
memorisation games, and printable materials. Rock Band 3 is a video game that hones skills
needed for playing drums, keyboards and guitars.

Unlike piano players, guitarists are frequently self-taught. In many cases, that means they never
bothered to learn music theory or to sight-read. Instead, they rely on a short-hand form of
notation called tablature, which shows the string and fret number for each finger position. The
tabs of most popular songs can be downloaded from any number of websites.

Ultimately, though, playing an instrument is more than just tapping, plucking, bowing or blowing
the correct sequence of notes. Prodigies may break all the rules, but most people need to learn
technique, articulation, sound character, key transposition and many other things about their
instrument. No amount of downloadable games, videos or books can embed such intimate
appreciation into the muscles and memory. Only an insightful teacher with a lifetimes experience
can do that in any meaningful way. Accept it, and get on with practising those scales. Tedious as
they may seem, they are the key to mastering music.

According to the RIAA the world music market is estimated at $40 billion, but according to IFPI (2004) it is
estimated at $32 billion.
Subscription-based services such as Spotify and Deezer offer music fans the chance to listen to as many songs
as they like in return for a monthly fee although they arent able to download and keep the music.
According to figures compiled by the Official Charts Company and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI),
7.4billion tracks were streamed in 2013, up from 3.7billion the year before.
The increase has come at the expense of CD sales which dropped by 12.8 per cent over the past year.

SIMON CABLE, Mail Online, 1 January 2014
the problem is NOT that people dont want to support the music industry; by and large, they
do. They dont, however, care to support an infrastructure that is no longer relevant to the
way that they appreciate music and musicians. The only reason for a fan to buy an album
when they can stream it for free at virtually any time is to support the artist- and nowadays,
there are much better ways to do that than buying an album.
The patronage model depends entirely on the relationship between the artist and their fans.
It hearkens back to the days of the Middle Ages, where the wealthly would financially
support artists, but with one crucial difference: thanks to the internet, this patronage can now
be crowdsourced from all over the world.
Appetite for Self-Destruction recounts the epic story of the precipitous rise and fall of the modern
recording industry, from an author who has been writing about it for more than ten years. With
unparalleled access to those intimately involved in the music worlds highs and lowsincluding
Warner Music chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr., renegade Napster creator Shawn Fanning, and
more than 200 othersSteve Knopper is the first to offer such a detailed and sweeping
contemporary history of the industrys wild ride through the past three decades. From the birth of
the compact disc, the explosion of CD sales, and the emergence of MP3-sharing websites that
led to iTunes, to the current collapse of the industry as CD sales plummet, Knopper takes us
inside the boardrooms, recording studios, private estates, garage computer labs, company jets,
corporate infighting, and secret deals of the big names and behind-the-scenes players who made
it all happen. Just as the incredible success of the CD turned the music business into one of the
most glamorous, high-profile industries in the world, the advent of file sharing brought it to its
knees, and Knopper saw it all.

From the Music Research Institute at Berklee College of Music comes a manifesto for the ongoing
music revolution. Today, the record companies may be hurting but the music-making business is
booming, using non-traditional digital methods and distribution models. Two innovators in music
technology take a fascinating look at the impact of the digital revolution on the music business and
predict "a future in which music will be like water: ubiquitous and free-flowing." Kusek and Leonhard
foresee the disappearance of CDs and record stores as we know them in the next decade;
consumers will have access to more products than ever, though, through a vast range of digital radio
channels, person-to-person Internet file sharing and a host of subscription services. The authors are
especially good at describing how the way current record companies operate - as both owners and
distributors of music, with artists making less than executives - will also drastically change: individual
CD sales, for example, will be replaced by "a very potent 'liquid' pricing system that incorporates
subscriptions, bundles of various media types, multi-access deals, and added-value services." While
the authors often shift from analysts into cheerleaders for the ber-wired future they predict - "Let's
replace inefficient content-protection schemes with effective means of sharing-control and
superdistribution!" - their clearly written and groundbreaking book is the first major statement of what
may be "the new digital reality" of the music business in the future.
Today, when fans file-share and preview music through YouTube, they do so,
because they desire the ability to reverse the decision, to delete the album if they
don't like it. As it turns out, the act of downloading the music (or streaming it) may be
the very reason that they don't like it as much, because they aren't stuck with it.
Thus, the synthetic happiness, i.e. adaptation, that prior generations experienced
when they bought a familiar, yet mediocre album, is never produced. Thus, since
they aren't committed to their music decisions, there's less pressure and synthetic
happiness to be had.
As a result, less purchases are made. The more fans fail to buy the familiar music,
the more pressure is placed on the next executive to find the next big star, who is
just like the old star that failed. Then major labels are forced to create more music
that has "the potential" to go viral and become and instant blockbuster, which feeds
into a vicious cycle that kills what it creates. Once this happens, everyone in the
chain from the executives to the fans grow very upset.
What happens when a traditional executive opts for a familiar artist, tries to spike
them in popularity, and finds that fans previewed the music and never bought it?