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The music industry is the industry that creates, performs, promotes, and preserves music.
The music industry is made up of:
- musicians such as singers
- musical ensembles
- Musicians' Unions
- composers and songwriters
- publishers such as Carlin America
- writers' copyright collectives and performance rights organisations like ASCAP and BMI
- record industry ("record" in this context means sound recordings in fixed form, be they tangible or digital)
- A&R
- band managers
- tour promoters
- bookers
- roadies
History
The first stirrings of a music industry came in the mid-to-late 18th century, when performers and composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart began to seek opportunities to market their music and performances to the general public, rather than survive entirely on patronage from the aristocracy and church. After Mozart's death, his wife, the soprano Constanze Weber, continued the process of commercialization of his music through an unprecedented series of memorial concerts, the slow but steady sale of his manuscripts, and a collaboration with her second husband, Georg Nissen, on a biography of her first. *
In the 19th century the music industry was dominated by sheet music publishers. In the United States, the music industry arose in tandem with the rise of blackface minstrelsy. The group of music publishers and songwriters which dominated popular music in the United States was known as Tin Pan Alley. In the early 20th century the phonograph industry grew greatly in importance, and the record industry eventually replaced the sheet music publishers as the industry's largest force.
Just as radio and television did before it, the advent of file sharing technologies may change the balance between record companies, song writers, and performing artists. Bands such as Metallica have fought back against peer-to-peer programs such as the infamous Napster, and the arguments for and against technology to circumvent them - digital rights management systems - remain controversial.
Further reading
- Norman Lebrecht, When the Music Stops: Managers, Maestros and the Corporate Murder of Classical Music, Simon & Schuster 1996
- Christian Imhorst, The ‘Lost Generation’ of the Music Industry, published under the terms of the GFDL 2004
Music industry organizations
"Music industry"