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Music Industry & Impact of the Internet

. The music industry has long faced challenges to the way that it is structured, and the music industry as it exists today is very different than the music industry that existed at the beginning of the twentieth century. To understand the challenges facing the music industry today, it is necessary to understand the issues that the music industry has confronted previously.

Recorded music only came into being in the late 1800s. Until that time, technology did not allow for the preservation of performances. Composers and musicians generated their incomes from performances, and later, from sheet music sales. The introduction of the phonograph meant that performances could be preserved and played repeatedly. The music publishing industry recognized that this provided an excellent way to promote sheet music. With the advent of radio (another new technology), the emphasis gradually shifted from using records to publicize sheet music to publicizing the recording of the performance itself. There was also some confusion about the format of the new technology, with some preferring cylinders to discs, but eventually, discs became the dominant medium (Leigh, 2000).

For much of the twentieth century, the music industry remained largely unchanged: a royalty system was worked out for the various participants in the value chain (publishers, record labels, artists and composers) and companies even developed to track performances to ensure that accurate royalties were paid. The number of record companies decreased until there were only a few large companies and many small labels that had only a few artists. Typically, artists moved to larger labels as they became more popular since the labels could offer more lucrative recording contracts (Leigh, 2000). The industry structure remained relatively intact since there were no real substitute products (record companies produced vinyl records, cassettes and compact discs which were sold through ...

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Music Industry & Impact of the Internet. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 18:47, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1694472.html