This book explores the fascinating world of the record business, its technology, the music and the musicians from Edison's phonograph to the compact disc. The great artists - Caruso, Toscanini, Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley and their successors - all achieved fame through the medium of records, and in turn have influenced the recording industry. But just as important are the record producers, those invisible figures who decide from behind the scenes how a record will sound. The history of recording is also the history of record companies: the book follows the vicissitudes of the multinational giants, without neglecting the small pioneering labels which have brought valuable new talents to the fore.

The Recording Industry presents a brief but comprehensive overview of how records are made, marketed, and sold. Designed for an introductory survey course, but also applicable to the amateur musician, the book opens with an overview of popular music and its place in American society, along with the key players in the recording industry: record companies; music publishers; and performance venues. In the book's second part, the making of a recording is traced from production through marketing and then retail sales. Finally, in part 3, legal issues, including copyright and problems of piracy, are addressed. - BOOK JACKET.

A brief but comprehensive examination of how records are made, marketed, and sold. This new edition takes into account the massive changes in the recording industry occurring today due to the revolution of music on the web.

The recording industry has been a major focus of interest for cultural commentators throughout the twenty-first century. As the first major content industry to have its production and distribution patterns radically disturbed by the internet, the recording industry’s content, attitudes and practices have regularly been under the microscope. Much of this discussion, however, is dominated by US and UK perspectives and assumes the ‘the recording industry’ to be a relatively static, homogeneous, entity. This book attempts to offer a broader, less Anglocentric and more dynamic understanding of the recording industry. It starting premise is the idea that the recording industry is not one thing but is, rather, a series of recording industries, locally organised and locally focused, both structured by and structuring the international industry. Seven detailed case studies of different national recording industries illustrate this fact, each of them specifically chosen to provide a distinctive insight into the workings of the recording industry. The expert contributions to this book provide the reader with a sense of the history, structure and contemporary dynamics of the recording industry in these specific territories, and counteract the Anglo-American bias of coverage of the music industry. The International Recording Industrieswill be valuable to students and scholars of sociology, cultural studies, media studies, cultural economics and popular music studies.

For 11 years the Recording Industry Sourcebook has served as the music industry insider's one-stop buyer's guide and a must have for building business relationships. With over 9,000 updated professional listings in more than 60 categories, the latest edition of the Sourcebook offers comprehensive directories of record labels, producers, managers, distributors, attorneys, equipment suppliers, music video companies, media contacts and much more. Entries list contact names, titles, addresses, phone and fax numbers, e-mail and web addresses, styles of music preferred, information on whether or not they'll accept unsolicited demos, and more. High-quality packaging, featuring laminated dividers and sturdy spiral binding, makes this annual a good investment.

The Recording Industry presents a brief but comprehensive examination of how records are made, marketed, and sold. The book opens with an overview of popular music and its place in American society, along with descriptions of key players in the recording industry. In the book's second part, the making of a recording is traced from production through marketing and retail sales. Finally, in Part III, legal issues, including copyright and problems of piracy, are addressed. The new edition takes into account the massive changes in the recording industry occurring today due to the revolution of music on the web. This new reality informs all parts of the second edition, from issues of production and distribution to legal issues.

The second edition of iTake-Over: The Recording Industry in the Streaming Era sheds light on the way large corporations appropriate new technology to maintain their market dominance in a capitalist system. To date, scholars have erroneously argued that digital music has diminished the power of major record labels. In iTake-Over, sociologist David Arditi suggests otherwise, adopting a broader perspective on the entire issue by examining how the recording industry strengthened copyright laws for their private ends at the expense of the broader public good. Arditi also challenges the dominant discourse on digital music distribution, which assumes that the recording industry has a legitimate claim to profitability at the expense of a shared culture. Arditi specifically surveys the actual material effects that digital distribution has had on the industry. Most notable among these is how major record labels find themselves in a stronger financial position today in the music industry than they were before the launch of Napster, largely because of reduced production and distribution costs and the steady gain in digital music sales. Moreover, instead of merely trying to counteract the phenomenon of digital distribution, the RIAA and the major record labels embraced and then altered the distribution system.

Louis Barfe's elegantly written, authoritative and highly entertaining history charts the meteoric rise and slow decline of the popular recording industry. In what is the only book to consider the development of the music business on both sides of the Atlantic, Barfe's journey starts with the first ever record to be played on a tin-foil cylinder phonograph and arrives in the present to meet an industry in disarray. He shows how the 1920s and 1930s saw the departure of Edison from the phonograph business he created and the birth of EMI and CBS. In this years after the war, these companies, and the buccaneers, entrepreneurs, hucksters, impresarios and con-men who ran them, reaped stupendous commercial benefits with the arrival of Elvis Presley, who changed popular music (and the sales of popular music) almost overnight. After Presley came the Beatles, when the recording industry became global and record sales reached all time highs.