The Global Music Industry: Three Perspectives

J^[=beXWb Cki_Y?dZkijho This Page intentionally left blank J^[=beXWb Cki_Y?dZkijho J^h[[F[hif[Yj_l[i Arthur Bernstein Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts, UK Naoki Sekine Epic Records Japan, Inc. Dick Weissman University of Colorado - Denver, Emeritus Routledge Routledge Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue 2 Park Square New York, NY 10016 Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN © 2007 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledgeisanimprint ofTaylor & FrancisGroup, anInformabusiness Transferred to Digital Printing 2008 International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-97580-8 (Softcover) 0-415-97579-4 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-97580-3 (Softcover) 978-0-415-97579-7 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bernstein, Arthur. The global music industry : three perspectives / Arthur Bernstein, Naoki Sekine, Richard Weissman. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-415-97579-7 -- ISBN 978-0-415-97580-3 1. Music trade. I. Sekine, Naoki. II. Weissman, Dick. III. Title. ML3790.B39 2007 338.4’778--dc22 2006039004 Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge.com CONTENTS About the Authors vii 1Introduction1 2 The Music Business in the United States 15 3 The Music Business in Canada 65 4 The Music Business in Latin America and the Caribbean 75 5 The Music Business in Africa 97 6 The Music Business in Europe 113 7 The Music Business in Asia 199 Conclusion: Loose Ends, Final Thoughts, and the Future 265 Index 271 This Page intentionally left blank ABOUT THE AUTHORS Arthur Bernstein is American born but has lived in Europe since 1976. A professional musician, he has worked as a guitarist and bassist in the United States and Europe playing pop, rock, jazz, blues, folk, country, and show music on guitar and bass. In 1978 he cofounded the “L’Aula de Música” in Barcelona, Spain. This was the first private music school of its type in Spain, with a curriculum focusing on contemporary pop music. In 1995 Bernstein was appointed head of music by the newly founded Liver- pool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA) in Liverpool, United Kingdom. LIPA is an innovative, world-class, university-level arts institution, whose lead patron is Sir Paul McCartney. An active international education con- sultant, he has been an adviser to industry and government bodies such as the European Music Offce and the European Commission on matters relating to music, training youth, and the music industry. He is a found- ing member and vice president of the Brussels-based European Modern Music Education Network. Naoki Sekine is Japanese but studied music business at New York University. He works for Epic Records Japan, Inc., and is a company liai- son to ten Asian countries, including China, India, and South Korea. In this capacity, he is deeply involved with contemporary music styles in Asia in a company that has a worldwide presence. He has written an extensive paper on the Asian music industry for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). He can be reached at [email protected]. Dick Weissman has an extensive background in studio work, record production, songwriting, and music business education. He was a member of the folk-pop group The Journeymen and has also recorded numer- ous solo instrumental albums. He has worked in the industry in New York and Los Angeles and is probably the most published American author writing about the music industry. This is his twelfth book on music and the music industry. His Web site is www.dickweissman.com. This Page intentionally left blank CHAPTER 1 Introduction It is a bit of a mystery to us why there is currently no book available that deals with the music industry as a global phenomenon. There are several dozen books about the American music industry and a half dozen on the music business in England, and a recent volume deals with the Australian music business. The groundbreaking bookBig Sounds from Little Peo- ple: The Music Business in the Third World by Krister Malm and Ralph Wallis deals with the music industry in the third world. The book is now twenty years old, and no one has followed up this work, other than the same authors, who published a much less ambitious volume several years later. There are a dozen or so generally academic books that discuss the relationship between music and politics. Many of these books are fascinat- ing, dealing with such matters as the underground transmis- sion of rock and roll in communist countries, but they seldom are very specific about the business aspects of the industry. We included the subtitle “Three Perspectives” because we not only cover different areas of the world but truly do have three different perspectives. We have each written according to our own style, with our own voice. It is interesting to note that our writing styles depict something of the music industry. The more informal tone in the chapters regarding the United States is, in fact, indicative of the more casual business envi- ronment, whereas the presentation of material in the chapters regarding Asia and Europe properly suggests more formal work relationships. 2 The Global Music Industry At the time of publication we are in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The record business really dates back to the early twentieth century, so it is only a hundred years old. During this time many profound changes have taken place. From a technological stand- point we have moved from cylinders to 78-RPM records, the long-playing record, eight-track tapes, cassettes, the aborted compact cassettes, the compact disc, enhanced compact disc, CD-ROMs, DVDs, and two-sided CDs that contain a CD side and a DVD side. Along the way we have graduated from “direct to disk recording” to the use of analog tape and various digital formats, such as A DAT tapes and Pro Tools. Many early recordings were done on location, wherever the artists were living, rather than in recording studios as such. These set- tings ranged from folkloristic recordings done in prisons, at work sites, or in people’s homes to rented hotel rooms and radio stations. By the 1930s many record companies had built expensive and large studios and used those facilities to record their artists. Although field recordings continued to be done by folklorists, and still are, in most instances record companies preferred to use their own stationary facilities. Prior to the introduction of multitrack recording, all recording sessions were done live, with singers and musicians working at the same time. The master recording was made direct to disk, and a simple mistake, such as an incorrect bass note, could require a large orchestra to record the same material over and over again. Multitrack recording began during the 1950s, pioneered by guitarist Les Paul and Mitch Miller. It was initially done by recording a piece over and over on different machines in a process called overdubbing, and as the number of available tracks proliferated, parts were recorded, often sepa- rately, on a single multitrack machine. By the time sixteen and twenty- four tracks had become available, artists were essentially compelled to use expensive urban facilities that were either owned by the companies or rented by them. Because of this high-level technology, most of these studios were located in such large cities as New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Los Angeles. When rock and roll became an important part of the record business, musical accuracy was often sacrificed to powerful rhythms and perfor- mances that focused on emotion rather than on technical musical excel- Introduction 3 lence. Of course in popular music this had always been the case to some extent, but it was accentuated in rock-and-roll records. In the early Elvis Presley records, for example, the musical content of the recordings is generally simple, but the energy and emotion communicated are profound. As a consequence the music began to be recorded in places such as Mem- phis or New Orleans, cities large enough to have recording facilities but far from the headquarters of the major record companies. Initially rock and roll was primarily an American phenomenon, but the British bands, notably the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin, quickly con- verted what was a phenomenon based on a marriage of American roots music styles into what by now is a worldwide vocabulary. By the end of the 1960s the smaller early American music centers had declined, and the American music business was headquartered in New York and Los Angeles, with the relatively new country music center of Nashville on the rise. Although many British rock-and-roll bands came from such cities as Liverpool and Newcastle, in England the London studios prevailed. In India the music scene became, and to a large extent remains, connected with the “Bollywood” movie industry, which centers in Mumbai (Bombay). Each country or area of the world has its own indigenous musical styles and tastes. One of the many revolutionary aspects of the Beatles’ music was that they brought Indian music to worldwide attention. The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin also plowed this ground, integrating Middle Eastern and North African music styles into their music.

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