Introduction To the Music Industry

Music taste can be a controversial topic –almost to the point of tribalism. Everyone has their own opinion and taste of various music, and it is hard to sway their views or try and convert them to listening to your favourite genre of music. Music is not just what you listen to it can affect all the aspects about you. Your personality, the way you dress, the way we speak and sometimes even the way we act. The main example of this is when a music company creates a star or a band that is destined for fame then they don’t want the star or band to be a one hit wonder. In fact the complete opposite they want to be able to market this band as long as possible this can be up to 20 - 30 years and sometimes even longer. It is more than the actual music to them; it mainly matters about how they’ve created a business like element from this band, a product of money. They start to produce t-shirts with the bands logo and faces on. This then starts to branch out to cups, wristbands, pillows, curtains .Any item that can have a design on it will be sought after by the company. The music company does this so that their star product can be known worldwide and achieve global stardom.

Some times the dynamic tension that exists between the artistic and commercial forces underpins the success of this vast media business. This may be due to thecae that sometimes that that the band as a whole does not work well together, whether it be their talent or other reasons. The only good act in the band may break away from the band and aim to try and launch a solo career. An example of this is Bruce Springsteen realising his full potential as a musician and going solo. Yet there is also this dynamic tension between bands and record companies, the tension between organic and synthetic music. Organic music is all about being natural and making music for the soul purpose of making music, the band write their own songs and make the music they want, this also means they earn 100 % of profit. This can also be considered real music as it is made by the band not a business tycoon music producer. Synthetic music is Factory based, manufactured pop bands, written for the band by the producers of usually big multimedia companies. This is usually a group of good looking girl or boys, created for the one and only reason to please mainstream audiences and make commercial record companies a lot of profit.

The pop video is only one strand of a multimedia campaign. Television, radio, newspaper and magazines also fall into this category as this is a great way to get music out world wide. With such a wide range of choices the pop video can be shown and displayed all over the media. For the example the single can be easily broadcasted on the radio while the actual music video can be shown on television, with the band being interviewed in a music magazine. 3 trans-national corporations dominate the music industry. Universal, Sony/BMG and Midmost are major companies which own a line of smaller companies. www.universalstudios.com

This is done so companies can have many various genres of music to reach different kinds of audiences a. These are called Major independents. Next there a record company that has little or no financial connections to the major ones. These are known as independent companies or ‘Indie’ companies.

The purpose of creating a music video is usually in order to promote a single or an album. A video being released is much more entertaining as it engages the audience more with the song , and from watching a video the audience can see what the real meanings of the song are. This also makes it easier to distribute on other kinds of media platforms such as TV , Advertising and internet , including youtube , my space and other social networking sites.

Trying to get your music video out to the public may be one of the hardest problems you can face but even once the video has been sent to the public whether its shown on various tv channels, or broadcasted on youtube there will still be problems facing it. The pop video is frequently is becoming less cared about and irrelevant to fans. At the rate of which modern society is downloading illegal music of the internet, more people are beginning to get more and more of their songs for free. This also has a knock on effect as when someone downloads a song by illegal means they then share it with a friend and the friend copies it over to his and the process repeats. This means that record sales are going down in their thousands. Music television is becoming more increasingly popular like shows like MTV , Kerrang and VH1 .Aswell as well as MTV just showing music videos it also airs new reality shows dealing with rich and annoying teenagers . The music videos that are mostly shown now are the more mainstream based ones , the idea is the more money the artist or the music company pays to the music tv shows , the more likely and often there video will shown per day.