MUH3025 The Music Business

The Music Business

Specifically, musicians went through many problems and faced many difficulties during the period associated with the Swing Era (1935-1945) because the overall nature of the music business changed and new restrictions appeared. The Great Depression impacted disposable income and constricted the market where people could obtain performative arts. The Second World War brought along restrictions on the use of various commodities, the limitation in movement through curtailment of free time, and the shortage of material that mitigated record-making and replication.

The feared American Federation of Musicians (AFM) strike of 1942 – 1944 sought AFM improved royalties on musicians' recording revenues that helped to bar commercial recordings that are central to musicians' income. Some radio stations and record companies tried to rely on older archived recordings or songs with vocal parts predominantly and no instrumental support, thus significantly shifting the landscape of the music industry.

Differently, today's musicians and songwriters also contend with the same issues in terms of economics. Music distribution in digital formats, including legal music downloading, music streaming, and services like YouTube, has had its positive but brought some challenges ranging from piracy to a reduction in earnings based on record sales. Of many sources of tension, the two main changes that could be highlighted are the shift toward self-promotion and independence in distribution that force musicians to be marketers and business people without the support of a record company. Services such as Spotify and Bandcamp serve as discovery tools, which, in a way, add to the problem of abundance and noise, which does not allow the artist to break through and make good money.

Presenting words and music of musicians, economic issues are shown for both past and present, revealing the dichotomy between art and market. Even as innovations continued to revolutionize the music industry, receiving the right remunerations and managing disruptive changes remain arduous tasks.

Work Cited

Starr, L., & Waterman, C. (2014). American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 (4th ed.). Oxford University Press. https://learninglink.oup.com/protected/files/content/file/5900abbc38293c0f005d2345-1495207919922-Chapter-5-Student-Study-Outline.docx-CE.pdf