“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...

In the meantime the marketing people prepare artwork and budgets for the displays at the base of each row of records, or “endcaps,”...

Once everyone has signed off on the recording, the A&R department hands it off to the product manager and the production department. At...

For the sake of this series, we’re going to assume our artist’s sales and story are convincing, else our Sherpa won’t have very much...

A brief tour of a fictitious record company WELCOME TO FUN with flowcharts. In this episode, we play Sherpa following a piece of music...