The Music Industry : Music in the Cloud, 2nd edition

The music industry is going through a period of immense change brought about in part by the digital revolution. What is the role of music in the age of computers and the Internet? How has the music industry been transformed by the economic and technological upheavals of recent years, and how is it likely to change in the future? This thoroughly revised and updated new edition provides an international overview of the music industry and its future prospects in the world of global entertainment. Patrik Wikström illuminates the workings of the music industry, and captures the dynamics at work in the production of musical culture between the transnational media conglomerates, the independent music companies and the public. New to this second edition are expanded sections on the structure of the music industry, online business models and the links between social media and music. Engaging and comprehensive, The Music Industry will be a must-read for students and scholars of media and communication studies, cultural studies, popular music, sociology and economics.

Business Innovation and Disruption in Publishing

This is the first volume in a book series examining how organizations in the creative industries respond to disruptive change and how they themselves generate business innovations. The aspiration of this book series is to understand some of the common forces behind the disruptions occurring in so many creative industries today and identifying the most promising strategies and responses by organizations to create new value propositions, business models and business practices that can enable these industry participants to cope with and eventually thrive as their industries and sectors are transformed. The chapters included in the volume examine the processes of disruption and transformation due to the technology of the Internet, social forces driven by social media, the development of new portable digital devices with greater capabilities and smaller size, the decreasing costs of new information, and the creation of new business models and forms of intellectual property ownership rights for a digitized industry. The context for this volume is the publishing industries, understood as the industries for the publishing of fiction and non-fiction books, academic literature, consumer as well as trade magazines, and daily newspapers. This volume includes chapters by an internationally diverse array of media scholars whose chapters provide insights into these phenomena in Eastern Europe, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Russia, and the United States, using different methodological frameworks including, but not limited to, surveys, in-depth interviews and multiple-case studies. One gap that this book series seeks to fill is that between the study of business innovation and disruption by innovation scholars largely based in business school settings and similar studies by scholarly experts from non-business school disciplines, including the broader social sciences (e.g. sociology, political science, economic geography) and creative industry based professional school disciplines (e.g. architecture, communications, design, film making, journalism, media studies, performing arts, photography and television). Future volumes of this book series will examine disruption and business innovation in the film, video and photography sectors (volume two), the music sector (volume three) and interactive entertainment (volume four), with subsequent volumes focusing on the most relevant developments in creative industry business innovation and disruption that emerge.

Digitization of the music industries in Australasia [Editorial]

The music business is one of the most international of all the cultural industries. Music, industry practices, and people travel easily across country borders and the major music companies are dominating national music markets across the globe. However, at the same time the music industries in different countries are very idiosyncratic. Music is an ingrained part of a country’s history, its culture and heritage. One aspect of this idiosyncrasy is related to how creatives, audiences and music organizations are affected by and is able to take advantage of the ongoing digitization of society...

Commercial successes in the music industry

Commercial success in the music industry is obviously related to one’s ability to use musical artisanship as a basis for generating profits and to accumulate substantial wealth. That may seem fairly straightforward, but commercial success is an elusive concept that is continuously negotiated within the industry to determine both what should be considered “success” as well as how it should be measured. This entry discusses commercial success in the popular music industry and strategies used to achieve it.

A typology of music distribution models

A typology of music distribution models is proposed consisting of the ownership model, the access model, and the context model. These models are not substitutes for each other and may co‐exist serving different market niches. The paper argues that increasingly the economic value created from recorded music is based on con‐text rather than on ownership. During this process, access‐based services temporarily generate economic value, but such services are destined to eventually become commoditised.

Music production in times of monopoly : the example of Sweden

For several decades now, Sweden has been successful in the worldwide popular music arena. This article explores how Sweden, as an integral part of the global music industry, has been able to cope with the changed market conditions brought about by regulatory changes and digital technologies. The article reflects on the virtualization of music distribution, the decline of the long‐play album and the ageing popular music audience.

The enemy of music : modeling the behavior of a cultural industry in crisis

The purpose of this explorative study is to contribute to the understanding of current music industry dynamics. The situation is undeniably quite dramatic: Since the turn of the millennium, the global music industry has declined by $ US 6.2 billion in value—a fall of 16.3% in constant dollar terms. IFPI, the trade organization representing the international recording industry, identifies a number of exogenous factors as the main drivers of the downturn. This article suggests that other factors, in addition to those identified by IFPI, may have contributed to the current difficulties. A model is presented which indicates that business strategies which were designed to cope with the challenging business environment have reduced product diversity, damaged profitability, and contributed to the problem they were intended to solve.

The transformation of Sweden from a haven for online pirates to the hope of the digital music industry [Musikbranschens föregångsland]

1974 was the year when the Swedish pop group ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton and when Blue Swede reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US. Although Swedish pop music gained some international success even prior to 1974, this year is often considered as the beginning of an era in which Swedish pop music had great success around the world. With brands such as ABBA, Europe, Roxette, The Cardigans, Ace of Base, In Flames, Robyn, Avicii, Swedish House Mafia and music producers Stig Andersson, Ola Håkansson, Dag Volle, Max Martin, Andreas Carlsson, Jorgen Elofsson and several others have the myth of the Swedish music miracle kept alive for nearly more than four decades. Swedish music looks to continue reap success around the world, but since the millennium, Sweden's relationship with music has been more focused on relatively controversial Internet-based services for music distribution developed by Swedish entrepreneurs and engineers rather than on successful musicians and composers. This chapter focusses on the music industry in Sweden. The chapter will discuss the development of the Internet services mentioned above and their impact on the production, distribution and consumption of recorded music. Ample space will be given in particular to Spotify, the music service that quickly has fundamentally changed the music industry in Sweden. The chapter will also present how the music industry's three sectors - recorded music, music licensing and live music - interact and evolve in Sweden.

Sounds From The Empty City (soundtrack)

These wordless songs were composed as music first, and soundtrack second. There is a difference. A soundtrack will always be connected with whatever it is accompanying. Music doesn’t neccessarily need to reference anything else. The Empty City transformed a picture book into a non-verbal performance combining the live and animated. Without spoken words the show would dance on the dangerous intersection of music, image and action. In both theatre and film (and this production drew on both traditions) soundtrack and music are often added on at the end when everything’s been pre-determined, a passive, responsive mode for such a powerful artform. It’s literally added in ‘post’. In The Empty City, music was present from its inception and grew with the show. It was active in process and product. It frequently led rehearsals and shaped other key decisions in virtual and live performance. Rather than tailor-make music towards pre-determined moments, independent compositions created without specific reference to narrative experimented with the creation of a flock of small musical pieces. I was interested in seeing how they flew and where they roosted, rather than having them born and raised in (narrative) captivity. The sonic palette is largely acoustic, incorporating ukulele, prepared piano and supported by a range of other elements tending towards electronica. Eventually more than seventy pieces of music were made for this show, twice the number used. These pieces were then placed in relation to the emerging scenes, then adapted in duration, texture and progression to develop a relationship with the scene. In this way, music (even when it’s synced) has a conversation with a performance, an exchange that may result in surprise rather than fulfillment of expectation. Leitmotif emerged from loops and layers, as the pieces of music ‘conversed’ with each other, rather than being premeditated and imposed. Nineteen of these tracks are compiled for this release, which finds the compositions (which progressed through many versions) poised at the moment between their fullest iteration as ‘music’ and their editing and full incorporation into a sychronised soundtrack. They are released as the began: as 'music-alone' (Kivy) In picture-book writing, the mutual interplay of text and image is sometimes referred to as interanimation , and this is the kind of symbiosis this project sought in the creation of the soundtrack. Reviewers of the noted the important role of the soundtrack in two separate productions of The Empty City: “The original score…takes centre stage” (Borhani, 2013) “…swept up in its repetition of sounds and images, like a Bach fugue” (Zampatti, 2013)

Digital Literacy and the Spaces of Academic Discourse

Digital literacy poses a particular challenge to the research-led university. Although these universities are often at the forefront of introducing digital literacy initiatives—such as e-learning platforms, technological infrastructure, and digital repositories—these applications of digital literacy tend to be more instrumental or functional than critical or creative. Certainly, this clash of cultures between the instrumental/functional and the critical/analytical is at the heart of debates over the uses of digital literacy in higher education. However, this simple equation of political forces with instrumentality and the corresponding equation of the university with a tradition of reflective thought that brings criticism to bear on instrumentality elide the fact that this conflict is more deeply rooted within the academy. This essay argues that, in fact, much of the resistance to critical uses of digital literacy comes from within the institution of the university itself. That is, the university is bound up in a scriptural economy that prioritises the printed word and that reinforces its power by way of a normative, political, and spatialised academic discourse. It is this print-based scriptural economy—in which this essay must acknowledge its own complicity—that a critical approach to digital literacy threatens to disrupt or lay bare.

The music industry in an age of digital distribution

In 1999 the global recorded music industry had experienced a period of growth that had lasted for almost a quarter of a century. Approximately one billion records were sold worldwide in 1974, and by the end of the century, the number of records sold was more than three times as high. At the end of the nineties, spirits among record label executives were high and few music industry executives at this time expected that a team of teenage Internet hackers, led by Shawn Fanning (at the time a student at Northeastern University in Boston) would ignite the turbulent process that eventually would undermine the foundations of the industry.

Unintended consequences : satellite policy and Indigenous television

This article examines two instances of media policy involving satellite transmission and Indigenous television: the introduction of the Viewer Access Satellite Television (VAST) platform in 2010 and the introduction of AUSSAT in the mid-1980s. The government’s failure to provide community and Indigenous broadcasters with an access regime at the time of AUSSAT resulted in Australia’s first and only Indigenous commercial television licensee, Imparja. Over a quarter of a century later, Imparja now forms part of the joint-venture company that runs VAST, a key component of Australia’s digital switchover planning. During the passage of the legislative amendments required to establish VAST, the issue of access resurfaced – this time in relation to Australia’s national and community Indigenous television channels. The article recounts the events leading up to the 2010 Bill, and examines the intended and unintended consequences of satellite policy in relation to Indigenous media, including equalisation and transparency of government funding programs.

The ‘Indigenous Australian’ theme in the Australian Curriculum English : necessary or not?

On Friday 10 January 2014 Education Minister Christopher Pyne formally announced a review of the inaugural Australian curriculum. In his three and half minute televised justification, Pyne (2014) identified a number of criticisms of the national curriculum document, including the ‘necessity to have themes’ of ‘Australia’s place in Asia, Indigenous Australia and sustainability’. It is the second of these themes that we consider as ALEA’s Hot Topic for March 2014. We respond to Pyne’s momentary musing of the necessity of the ‘Indigenous Australian’ theme in the Australian Curriculum with a particular focus on the discipline of English. In the nomenclature of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority’s Australian Curriculum (ACARA, 2013), we are of course referring to the ‘cross curriculum priority’ of ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures’.

Australian Indigenous Art : Local Dreamings, Global Consumption (Autohtona Australijska Umetnost : Lokalno Sanjarenje, Globalna Potražnja)

Indigenous Australian visual art is an outstanding case of the dynamics of globalization and its intersection with the hyper-local wellsprings of cultural expression, and of the strengths and weaknesses of state, philanthropic and commercial backing for cultural production and dissemination. The chapter traces the development of the international profile of Indigenous ‘dot’ art – a traditional symbolic art form from the Western Desert – as ‘high-end’ visual art, and its positioning within elite markets and finance supported by key international brokers, collectors and philanthropists.