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Us Music Industry

Industry brief: Music recording
In the music business is one is a set of recording companies that produce over 20,000 new recordings each year, The object of the recording companies is to get these titles on the shelves of retailers and then to get them off the shelves into the hands of the public.
These shelves are very full. And not only are recordings in every type of music contending for shelf space, but they are also contending with over 100,000 backlisted titles. So that the Black Crowes are not only competing with Eminem for space in the Tower Records shelves; they are also fighting with five decades of predecessors from Chuck Berry and the Beatles through to Metallica and Aerosmith.
It costs several million dollars to record and launch any major new pop album these days. And audience tastes are unpredictable, so many of these launches are for naught. Music companies are saved by the occasional big hit among the many flops. But winning shelf space and mind space while prolonging shelf life is harder than it’s ever been. And now comes a new threat – digital distribution of music over the Internet, as fans have been sharing recordings and avoid buying recordings off the shelves.
Music then is in transition. It’s going from a tangible that you buy off the shelves to an intangible, something that’s on the Net and available to anyone who can in turn record them on tape or CD. This “de-materialization” of music has the big five companies worried, and with good reason. Will music stop being a product and return to being a service?
The Big Five
In the last ten years, the rate of concentration in the $40 billion music industry has been breathtaking. Five companies have taken over vertical and horizontal control over almost every aspect of the industry. These five own virtually every record label you can name -- a curious leftover term from when music came on vinyl records with actual paper labels in the center). Many of these labels with histories back to...