American newspapers have faced competition from new media for over ninety years. Today digital media challenge the printed word. In the 1920s, broadcast radio was the threatening upstart. At the time, newspaper publishers of all sizes turned threat into opportunity by establishing their own stations. Many, such as the Chicago Tribune's WGN, are still in operation. By 1940 newspapers owned 30 percent of America's radio stations. This new type of enterprise, the multimedia corporation, troubled those who feared its power to control the flow of news and information. In Sound Business, historian Michael Stamm traces how these corporations and their critics reshaped the ways Americans received the news. Stamm is attuned to a neglected aspect of U.S. media history: the role newspaper owners played in communications from the dawn of radio to the rise of television. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources, he recounts the controversies surrounding joint newspaper and radio operations. These companies capitalized on synergies between print and broadcast production. As their advertising revenue grew, so did concern over their concentrated influence. Federal policymakers, especially during the New Deal, responded to widespread concerns about the consequences of media consolidation by seeking to limit and even ban cross ownership. The debates between corporations, policymakers, and critics over how to regulate these new kinds of media businesses ultimately structured the channels of information distribution in the United States and determined who would control the institutions undergirding American society and politics. Sound Business is a timely examination of the connections between media ownership, content, and distribution, one that both expands our understanding of mid-twentieth-century America and offers lessons for the digital age.

China and Japan are in the sound business--they just don't realize it. Not the kind of sound business usually associated with prosperous Asian economies, but the Chinese characters they use by the billions every day. For centuries Chinese characters have served as a powerful symbol of the cultural divide between east and west, but all that is about to change. Sound Business: The Reality of Chinese Characters, written by MA in Japanese Studies and Chinese Philip Philipsen, presents a whole new picture of Chinese characters seen in world perspective. And this is a world that sound makes go around. Get a rare insight into the real function, usage, etymology and true origin of Chinese characters, and be prepared to lose your breath as you discover our astonishing shared heritage. Mixing past and present avant-garde Japanese, Chinese and western research, Sound Business: The Reality of Chinese Characters takes you on a journey that will forever change the way you look at Chinese characters. Join the revolution!

Companies really need to think about their principles. They need to do this for themselves, as opposed to simply reproducing existing codes, simply taking principles off the proverbial shelf and applying these to their structures. There are a number of ways to do this. One is through open dialogue. You can also collaborate with all relevant stakeholders, ensuring that you come up with the best possible principles that can move your business forward. Whatever way you choose to approach this, know that the development of sound business principles is as important, if not more so, that even your business plan! These principles can also take on a number of forms. They can be high-level statements of principle, laying out for your company the roadmap to its advancement. Business principles can also be statements of policy, indicating how you intend to do business, more than what you intend to do with your business. Still, some of these are a combination of separate documents, ones that indicate policy, systems of management, implementation as well as monitoring procedures for your business!

Building Routes to Customers explains the powerful “Routes-to-Market” approach for driving profitable growth. World-class organizations including IBM, Microsoft, HP, Cisco, Hitachi, Adobe and Plantronics, and hundreds of smaller companies, have adopted RTM to develop and execute highly successful go-to-market strategies and tactics. With a step-by-step approach and dozens of examples, the authors show how you can use RTM to: (1) Determine the optimal level of spending for each function in marketing, sales and customer service, for each market segment, product and service. (2) Optimize your marketing mix and sales and distribution channels to maximize revenue and profitability throughout the product life cycle. (3) Get everyone in product management, marketing, sales, customer service, and your distribution partners aligned and working together to maximize results. (4) Get the right products and services to the right customers at the right time. (5) Retain existing customers and create profitable new ones.

In this first book-length study of chindon-ya, Marié Abe investigates the intersection of sound, public space, and sociality in contemporary Japan. Chindon-ya, dating back to the 1840s, are ostentatiously costumed street musicians who publicize a business by parading through neighborhood streets. Historically not considered music, but part of the everyday soundscape, this vernacular performing art provides a window into shifting notions of musical labor, the politics of everyday listening and sounding, and street music at social protest in Japan. Against the background of long-term economic downturn, growing social precarity, and the visually and sonically saturated urban streets of Japan, this book examines how this seemingly outdated means of advertisement has recently gained traction as an aesthetic, economic, and political practice after decades of inactivity. Resonances of Chindon-ya challenges Western conceptions of listening that have normalized the way we think about the relationship between sound, space, and listening subjects, and advances a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship that examines the ways social fragmentation is experienced and negotiated in post-industrial societies. Hardcover is un-jacketed.