Big Ideas of the Recording Industry (ch. 7)

1. The Winners and Losers
2. Copyright Battles
3. The Big Three: Sony, Universal, Warner vs. Indie Labels

Throughout the start of the recording industry with the invention of the phonographic by Thomas Edison, the industry was a constant competition for the best format for recordings. The "format wars" were decided based on cost, quality of sound, and customer convenience (but mainly on cost). Today there is an ongoing battle between CD's and digital downloads. So the question is which format will win out? The interesting thing is that as of now (well when the textbook was published) the industry's bulk of revenue still comes from full length CDs (77.8%).  Is this because a lot of people are still buying  CDs (because I haven't bought one in years) or is it because people are illegally downloading music online, so CDs are the top revenue by default? And I can't help but wonder, what happens when one of these formats are crowned as victor of this battle; what will come next???

The history of recording, along with the format wars, has been filled with the battles over copyright privileges. This big winners in all of these seem to be the big companies; they don't want to lose ANY money. There challenge is to adapt to new formats of music and recording and ways to protect their rights over the songs. The idea that I found interesting in this are was the Close-up box on Radiohead. They released their album In Rainbows exclusively on their website and offered the song at any retail price of the customers choice. They had no help from the record label so they received no profit.  I found this as a slap in the face to the big companies and i laughed a little. I also thought it was brave of the group to do this and also very sweet that their loyal fans paid reasonable amounts for the album. The group also made most of their money through touring, which is the case of most artist, so the question is, why don't more artist try this approach to selling music? Maybe it'll be a surprise and people will buy the album for 4 dollars online instead of free on some illegal site and the artist would receive most, f not all, of that 4 dollars. Something to think about.

Lastly, The recording music industry is controlled by three major companies right now. In essence they control 80 percent of what people listen to and decide what is "Hot" and what people will like. This kinda seems like a inconvenient thing because the companies stay strictly with what is "marketable", but what if the next big game changer is constantly rejected because a company doesn't see the sound as profitable. The companies hate losing money and will almost never take a chance on something new, fresh and different. So thats where the independent labels come in and discover the brilliant talent. But almost always these successful labels are bought by the big companies. So will indie labels ever stand up for themselves and remain indie? Or will this system stay because it seems to be working?