A couple friends of one music commentator promote records independently. They use their contacts and experience in specialised markets to...

During that investigation, several Sony/BMG promotion department memos became public: “Please be advised that in this week’s Jennifer...

As a result of the hearings, Clark was forced to divest himself of many of his side businesses, ancillary to his hit television show...

The power of the DJ led to some of the more interesting courtship rituals in corporate America. The record companies catered to vices the...

At the turn of the 20th century, phonograph records were not the only game in town. As America became more affluent, every well-heeled...

The bottom line is that radio and records have become big business, and as the business gets bigger, the players seem to become more...

This scene takes place in a radio station programming department. Ring! Ring! “WHNK programming. Hank here.” “Hey, this is Beth from PoMo...

At its heart, Selector is a database program. The director of programming or music at the radio station inputs information for each song...

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...