Summary on what we learnt on the state of the music industry

THE BIG 3 RECORD COMPANIES

We learnt that the music industry has changed over the last decade, in a very big way. The big 4 companies, Sony Music, EMI, Universal and Warner Music have now become the big 3 due to EMI becoming a part Universal  The music industry is also losing a lot of money due to an increase in piracy and file sharing, however companies such as Apple have taken advantage of digital distribution and have raked in massive profits, a song on iTunes would cost 79p with apple getting 13p. There are over millions of songs on iTunes so there is big profit. This change in the music industry has lead to artists and record companies coming up with different ways to make a profit, by coming up with deals such as the 360 degree deal, where the record company gets a chunk of any other source of revenue coming from the artist. Artists today use music to endorse their products, such as Dr Dre to endorse his new line of headphones, Beats By Dre. Another way the industry has changed is the emergence of the social network sites, celebrities often communicate with fans on websites such as twitter, there is more fan/artist interaction than there would have been 10 years ago.