Back in the 1970s, radio meant the world to many a folk. One avid fan of album rock station WNEW-FM, he says; “I learned more about music...

Throughout 1996 and 1997, rarely did a month go by without the announcement of some Sillerman acquisition. Then he sold off all his radio...

Starting in the Reagan administration, regulations that had held media ownership in check for five decades began to get stripped away. By...

Who owns the airwaves? Who actually has the ultimate rights to all those broadcast frequencies? The airwaves in America (and indeed, in...

“You don’t need the major record companies,” said Barry Bergman, president of the Music Managers Forum U.S., “for anything but mass...

This also does not cover the other costs that might get written off against the artists’ royalties according to the contract while the...

Consider the infrastructure of a major record company, as laid out in earlier articles. On the profits from less than 7 percent of its...

Independent record companies, meanwhile, operate with far less overhead than the majors. The accepted independent average break-even...

Every now and again (in the recent past), Billboard columnist Ed Christman would sit down with his SoundScan figures and a calculator and...

By summer 2002, the RIAA had become desperate. It began to get aggressive not just with the companies putting out the P2P software, but...

The record companies were in the middle of a period of marked decline, with a brief respite in 2004. They saw CD sales dip from a 1999...

The record business’s ostrichlike procrastination made possible a future in which music became a free good rather than a commodity, via a...

Even so, sound recordings would become far less expensive, because the physical packaging, warehousing, and real estate expenses would...

Strangely, the next great panic attack came as sort of a delayed reaction, though one that Weiss foresaw, in terms of the ability to...

But what was it really scared of? More than anything else, it was lack of control. For the first time since one of Edison’s minions put a...

“It’s a great scam if you think about it,” wrote David Shamah, an economics reporter for the Jerusalem Post. “You bought, say, Goodbye...

Continuing from last week’s article; author Hank Bordowitz further recounts: The era of compromise and deliberation over the chart...

In this article, we explore the experiences and perspectives of one music industry expert and author Hank Bordowitz on how changes in the...

What has changed over the years is the role of the A&R department. In the early days, they still went out and found talent, but, as the...

Q: How many A&R guys does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: We can’t screw anymore – they cut off our balls! Vic Steffens and Mike...