The Music Industry

The music industry is an ever-evoling and a fast-moving business. Over the last decades, things starts to change hugely. The industry is structured into two traditionally sides. One being MAINSTREAM labels the other being INDEPENDENT labels.

• Mainstream labels: A large organisation with revenues available for different acts and are therefore able to saturate markets and offer high production values on promotional materials

• Independent labels: separate to and operate independently of the Mainstream labels. Often operate within niche genres and cater to specific markets.  

Every music artist out there aim to to be signed with a record label to promote their music to their target market and selling maximum numbers of albums.

One thing that changed over the last 10 years was the ownership. 

Between the 1970's and late 1990s, the industry was dominated by the 'big 6'.

Later after that, companies began to merge together and as of 2010, there are now the 'big 4'

 (pictured below): 

Each one of these big four has a subsidiary label that specialise in different genres / are of market which enable the big 4 to dominate most markets. 

Nowadays, sales and profit margins of these albums has dropped drastically over the years:

2008 - 428m

2009 - 366m

2010 - 319m

So why has the album sales and market dropped?

Shifts in consumers behaviours and illegally download music off the internet is a couple of reasons why.  

This chart shows that the albums (physical) sales has dropped throughout the years and everything brought digitally as the years increase.