Business
Music Business
The music industry is the business of music. Although it encompasses the activity of many music-related businesses and organizations, it is currently dominated by the “big four” record groups, also known as “the major labels”/”the majors” — Sony BMG, EMI, Universal and Warner — each of which consists of many smaller companies and labels serving different regions and markets.When the term music industry is used in a narrow sense, it refers only to the businesses and organizations that record, produce, publish, distribute, and market recorded music (e.g., music publishers, recording industry, record production companies). This corresponds to the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC) that includes sound recording and music publishing activities (J-59).
At the Music Business Academy, we have two primary goals: first, we aim to teach musicians how to use the Internet to their financial advantage, whether that means using the Net to sell more CDs, ‘get the word out,’ or simply to make some extra cash. Secondly, we aim to arm musicians with all the information they need to move their music career forward in the ‘real’ world, with or without a major label record deal. Find out more about our musician services, visit our musician’s guide to the web, read our music business tips, or get help with planning strategies for effective music promotion on the Internet! The most important departments at a record label are Artists & Repertoire, and Marketing. A&R’s job is to find new talent, and Marketing’s job is to publicize it. These are both genuinely hard tasks, and unlike production or distribution, there is no serious competition for those functions outside the labels themselves. Prior to its demise, Napster began publicizing itself as a way to find new music, but this was a fig leaf, since users had to know the name of a song or artist in advance. Napster did little to place new music in an existing context, and the current file-sharing networks don’t do much better. In strong contrast to writing and photos, almost all the music available on the internet is there because it was chosen by professionals.
If you’re a musician or if you work in the music industry in any capacity that involves record sales (labels, distribution, and record shops) - and you don’t know about returns yet, you will. Returns are just what they sound like - returned product. When record stores buy copies of a new release from a distributor, only to discover that the album just won’t sell, often they can return that product back to the distributor after a certain amount of time. The way this shakes down for a record label reading a monthly sales sheet is that the first month of release can look great, then the second month sees those numbers falling a little bit, and then third month sees those numbers fall A LOT - so you can think you’ve sold a few thousand records, and when it all shakes out, you’ve sold only a few hundred.Building on its international reputation for delivering an innovative and relevant music business curriculum, the MA MBM is designed to equip students for management careers in the music industry. Working with music industry leaders and organisations the MA MBM has developed a unique curriculum that combines a strong underpinning of key business skills (finance, leadership, organisational management, marketing and entrepreneurialism), with essential music industry management knowledge (strategic innovation and technology, intellectual property and copyright, global issues and challenges).
