The Single and The Music Industry

With the radical growth of music file sharing in North America from 1999, especially in the under-30 age demographic, many who earn their livelihood in the music industry are of the opinion that this is in some way related to industry practices… that the industry had sown the seeds of its own demise through the slow killing of singles in all formats and the overpricing of compact discs. Both policies steadfastly denied by industry bodies. In a series of articles here on Indyish - posted with help while I’m traveling over the next month - I’ll attempt to detail both industry policy and the resulting changes in sales demographics during the previous decade to establish whether this was, in fact, the case.

“Industry policy” in this case will be defined as the actions of the members of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) - an industry body representing the then-Big Six (now Big Four) major record labels: Warner, EMI, PolyGram, Sony, MCA and BMG - and their subsidiaries and the association itself.

Analog Rights - flickr user takomabibelot

Record labels come in either “major” or “indie” varieties. The name “major label” refers mainly to distribution: the majors find and sign musical artists and also have their own extensive international promotion and distribution networks. While the “majors” don’t act in unison all the time, they are responsible for very clear trends within the industry, accounting between them for well over three-quarters of all North American record sales and, through foreign subsidiaries, significant market share throughout the Western world.

By comparison, an “indie” - from “independent” – label finds and signs talent to recording deals but uses an external distributor, generally not one of the major labels. Indies that use major label distribution are considered less artistically “pure” by some standards, sometimes not even truly “independent,” since the company owning the distribution could be involved in any number of activities…

“We found out… that all the bread we made for Decca was going into making little black boxes that go into American Air Force bombers to bomb fucking North Vietnam…. That was it. Goddamn, you find you’ve helped to kill God knows how many people without even knowing it. I’d rather the Mafia than Decca.” - Keith Richards

[Garofalo, Reebee. “From Music Publishing to MP3: Music and Industry in the Twentieth Century.” American Music, Vol. 17, No. 3. (Autumn, 1999), pp. 318-354.]