Here's a Coincidence...

[tonepoet]

So, I was thinking the other day that I would like to know how the Music Business works these days, since the last book I read on it was "This Business of Music" back in the 1980s.

I wanted the latest book, since technology is changing so rapidly. So, I'm looking at the publishing dates and I'm seeing 2013, 2015, with the newest being this one with the yellow dust jacket published in 2019, a 10th Edition of the book.



Well, geez, even that is almost 5 years old. And as I was mulling over whether to push the "buy" button, suddenly the photo turns blue and it's the 11th Edition.



I looked at all the web sites I was considering to buy from and they all now were showing this blue 11th Edition. I checked the publication date and it read October 24, 2023. And I thought, Wait a minute... that's today's date. How weird that I was deciding to buy the 5 year old edition at the moment that the new 11th Edition went live on line.

I ordered it from Amazon in its first hour of publication and it was in my hands the next day. I guess it doesn't get any fresher than that.

It is very informative, by the way. The author has been a music business lawyer for 40 years. I've read through it once already, with sharpened pencil and straight-edge and am now going through it a second time.

Being a guy that grew up on vinyl records, the whole "streaming" world is foreign to me. And as this book mentions, "Greatest Hits" albums are no longer a thing, since everyone can put together their own playlists now. And "Live" albums are no longer a thing since you can go to YouTube to hear and see live performances of songs now. And even the "album" concept isn't really a thing, since most streamers buy one song at a time.

 

[Cougar]

So, I was thinking the other day that I would like to know how the Music Business works these days, since the last book I read on it was "This Business of Music" back in the 1980s.

I wanted the latest book, since technology is changing so rapidly. So, I'm looking at the publishing dates and I'm seeing 2013, 2015, with the newest being this one with the yellow dust jacket published in 2019, a 10th Edition of the book.



Well, geez, even that is almost 5 years old. And as I was mulling over whether to push the "buy" button, suddenly the photo turns blue and it's the 11th Edition.



I looked at all the web sites I was considering to buy from and they all now were showing this blue 11th Edition. I checked the publication date and it read October 24, 2023. And I thought, Wait a minute... that's today's date. How weird that I was deciding to buy the 5 year old edition at the moment that the new 11th Edition went live on line.

I ordered it from Amazon in its first hour of publication and it was in my hands the next day. I guess it doesn't get any fresher than that.

It is very informative, by the way. The author has been a music business lawyer for 40 years. I've read through it once already, with sharpened pencil and straight-edge and am now going through it a second time.

Being a guy that grew up on vinyl records, the whole "streaming" world is foreign to me. And as this book mentions, "Greatest Hits" albums are no longer a thing, since everyone can put together their own playlists now. And "Live" albums are no longer a thing since you can go to YouTube to hear and see live performances of songs now. And even the "album" concept isn't really a thing, since most streamers buy one song at a time.

IOW, the music business has gone down the tubes?

 

[tonepoet]

IOW, the music business has gone down the tubes?

It certainly is different now, with positives and negatives.

Once the electronics industry put cassette tape players/recorders for home and car on the market, the Record Labels lost control of their product. Anyone could duplicate albums onto cassette tapes in unlimited numbers, killing sales and hurting the labels, publishers, artists and songwriters.

Fast forward (no pun intended) to early streaming on the Web, and the Labels, Publishers, recording artists and songwriters were all getting hosed by streaming, as well.

Enter an unlikely hero... Congress... who passed the Modern Music Act into law in 2018 that said streaming is no different then sales in a store and playing music on the radio... so, pay up.

Technology made cassette tapes and even CDs less convenient. Car companies stopped putting tape decks or CD players in cars.

Congress put wording into the Modern Music Act that said a recording ("phonorecord") shall include "currently unknown technology", which should keep a debacle like what happened early on with streaming from happening again.

But, alas, Record Stores are all but gone. In our early 20s, my brother and I would spend every Saturday afternoon at the local record store flipping through the bins of records for what was new and in the "Cut-Out" bins for what was being dumped at 99 cents an album. The owner used to tease us that he was going to get chairs with wheels for both of us so that we could just roll up and down the aisles.

When living in San Francisco, when CDs hit the market, we used to hang out at Recycled Records on Haight Street to flip through all the used albums for gems and discoveries.

Now, apparently no one cares about albums. They just stream individual songs. No album cover art, no liner notes to read, no spending an afternoon at the local record store flipping through the albums in bin after bin. I miss that aspect.