The Music Industry

The music industry involves the production, distribution, and sale of music in a variety of forms as well as the promotion of live musical performance. People arguably have bought, sold, and bartered music for as long as it has been made. Street singers, roving minstrels, broadside sellers, and traveling music teachers developed makeshift grassroots music industries that differed more in scale than in kind when compared to the modern music business.

Beginning in the early 1880s, publishing firms became concentrated around Manhattan's 28th Street, dubbed Tin Pan Alley by the newspaper writer and songwriter Monroe H. Rosenfeld. The city's publishers perfected the mass production and distribution of songs. Usually paying staff or freelance composers a flat rate per song, Tin Pan Alley firms issued thousands of titles in the hope that a few would hit with the nation's public. Publishers courted popular vaudeville singers, often paying them handsomely to include a song of choice in their act.

 Yet by the 1890s, "nickel-in-the-slot" talking machines graced urban arcades, introducing the nation to the novelty of mechanically reproduced music. A few companies controlled the patents to competing phonograph technologies. Edison controlled his wax cylinder playback technology. He licensed it to the fledgling Columbia Phonograph Company and the two introduced the first talking machines designed for home use in 1896. By this time, the competing gramophone disk machines and records made by Emile Berliner were already liberally distributed

These firms raced to establish their technology as the consumer standard throughout the United States and the world. Victor eventually won the technology wars by focusing on the home consumer trade, creating celebrity recording artists such as the opera singer Enrico Caruso, and expanding internationally. In 1901, Victor and licensee Gramophone divided the globe into distinct markets and established distribution networks, retail outlets, and recording operations from China to Latin America. Other companies quickly followed suit.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, the music industry was characterized by a wave of corporate mergers and transnational expansion. In 1994, 90% of worldwide gross music sales accrued to six multinational corporations. The century ended much as it had begun, even as the industry giants grappled with the copyright repercussions of the digital revolution.