The Music Industry

Production

- Advanced in technology

- User-based production

- No-reliance on record company

- Musical expertise not needed e.g. garage band, logic > loop based software. Evidence in manufactured artists

- Cost no long an issue > prosumer software

Distribution

- internet as a primary medium, use of web 2.0

- can be free, largely accessed as 'free' music

- not legal in most cases > file sharing through limewire

- making physical formats obsolete [tapes, CD] > impacts on retail outlets

- difficult to track and monitor

- industries forced to think of new ways of marketing in keeping with interactive nature of distribution

Consumptions

- follows trends of using new media technologies e.g. youtube

- link to image more explicitly through visual media

- saturate and dilated experiences of accessing music > devalued?

There are 4 main record companies

- Warner Brothers

- Sony

- Universal

- EMI

Stafford (2007):
"The music industry can be defined as the organisation of various activities associated with performing and recording music and distributing access to those performances around the World. Because the basis of music production is accessible to everyone with a modicum of talent, the industry is both more 'open' than filmmaking and less easily 'controllable' than traditional broadcast television. This has led to a longstanding institutional difference between small and 'independent' music organisations and a large corporate 'mainstream'.

Time Line

1980: CD technology
1982: CDs usable on PC
1988: Sales of CD overtake vinyl
1990: Recordable CDs available
1997: Emergence of MP3
1999: Napster > Copyright battles
2000: Broadband introduced
2001: iPod & iTunes launched
2003: CD sales fallen by a third
2005: iPod shuffle made downloading cheaper and more accessible

iPod sells at a rate of 3.5 million a month.

Vertical integration: Creates everything - blurs the lines between production, distribution & consumption.