The recording industry has been a major focus of interest for cultural commentators throughout the twenty-first century. As the first major content industry to have its production and distribution patterns radically disturbed by the internet, the recording industry’s content, attitudes and practices have regularly been under the microscope. Much of this discussion, however, is dominated by US and UK perspectives and assumes the ‘the recording industry’ to be a relatively static, homogeneous, entity. This book attempts to offer a broader, less Anglocentric and more dynamic understanding of the recording industry. It starting premise is the idea that the recording industry is not one thing but is, rather, a series of recording industries, locally organised and locally focused, both structured by and structuring the international industry. Seven detailed case studies of different national recording industries illustrate this fact, each of them specifically chosen to provide a distinctive insight into the workings of the recording industry. The expert contributions to this book provide the reader with a sense of the history, structure and contemporary dynamics of the recording industry in these specific territories, and counteract the Anglo-American bias of coverage of the music industry. The International Recording Industrieswill be valuable to students and scholars of sociology, cultural studies, media studies, cultural economics and popular music studies.

This book explores the fascinating world of the record business, its technology, the music and the musicians from Edison's phonograph to the compact disc. The great artists - Caruso, Toscanini, Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley and their successors - all achieved fame through the medium of records, and in turn have influenced the recording industry. But just as important are the record producers, those invisible figures who decide from behind the scenes how a record will sound. The history of recording is also the history of record companies: the book follows the vicissitudes of the multinational giants, without neglecting the small pioneering labels which have brought valuable new talents to the fore.

The Recording Industry presents a brief but comprehensive overview of how records are made, marketed, and sold. Designed for an introductory survey course, but also applicable to the amateur musician, the book opens with an overview of popular music and its place in American society, along with the key players in the recording industry: record companies; music publishers; and performance venues. In the book's second part, the making of a recording is traced from production through marketing and then retail sales. Finally, in part 3, legal issues, including copyright and problems of piracy, are addressed. - BOOK JACKET.

In Recording History, Peter Martland uses a range of archival sources to trace the genesis and early development of the British record industry from1888 to 1931. A work of economic and cultural history that draws on a vast range of quantitative data, it surveys the commercial and business activities of the British record industry like no other work of recording history has before. Martland's study charts the successes and failures of this industry and its impact on domestic entertainment. Showcasing its many colorful pioneers from both sides of the Atlantic, Recording History is first and foremost an account of The Gramophone Company Ltd, a precursor to today's recording giant EMI, and then the most important British record company active from the late 19th century until the end of the second decade of the twentieth century. Martland's history spans the years from the original inventors through industrial and market formation and final take-off--including the riveting battle in recording formats. Special attention is given to the impact of the First World War and the that followed in its wake. Scholars of recording history will find in Martland's study the story of the development of the recording studio, of the artists who made the first records (from which some like Italian opera tenor Enrico Caruso earned a fortune), and the change records wrought in the relationship between performer and audience, transforming the reception and appreciation of musical culture. Filling a much-needed gap in scholarship, Recording History documents the beginnings of the end of the contemporary international record industry.

Record Cultures tells the story of how early U.S. commercial recording companies captured American musical culture in a key period in both music and media history. Amid dramatic technological and cultural changes of the 1920s and 1930s, small recording companies in the United States began to explore the genres that would later be known as jazz, blues, and country. Smaller record labels, many based in rural or out of the way Midwestern and Southern towns, were willing to take risks on the country’s regional vernacular music as a way to compete with more established recording labels. Recording companies’ relationship with radio grew closer as both industries were on the rise, propelled by new technologies. Radio, which had become immensely popular, began broadcasting more recorded music in place of live performances, and this created profitable symbiosis. With the advent of the talkies, the film industry completed the media trifecta. The novelty of recorded sound was replacing film accompanists, and the popularity of movie musicals solidified film’s connections with the radio and recording industries. By the early 1930s, the recording industry had gone from being part of the largely autonomous phonograph industry to being major media industry of its own, albeit deeply tied to—and, in some cases, owned by—the radio and film industries. The triangular relationships between these media industries marked the first major entertainment and media conglomerates in U.S. history. Through an interdisciplinary and intermedial approach to recording industry history, Record Cultures creates new connections between different strands of media research. It will be of interest to scholars of popular music, media studies, sound studies, American culture, and the history of film, television, and radio.

A brief but comprehensive examination of how records are made, marketed, and sold. This new edition takes into account the massive changes in the recording industry occurring today due to the revolution of music on the web.

An absorbing account of the record industry's worst nightmare. In the summer of 1969, Great White Wonder, a collection of unreleased Bob Dylan recordings appeared in Los Angeles. It was the first rock bootleg and it spawned an entire industry dedicated to making unofficial recordings available to true fans. Bootleg! tells the whole fascinating saga, from its underground infancy through the CD 'protection gap' era, when its legal status threatened the major labels' monopoly, to the explosion of trading via Napster and Gnutella on MP-3 files. Clinton Heylin provides a highly readable account of the busts, the defeats and victories in court; the personalities – many interviewed for the first time for this book. This classic history has now been updated and revised to include today's digital era and the emergence of a whole new bootleg culture.

Tests copyright's fundamental premise that more money will increase creative output using the US recording industry from 1962-2015.

(Book). The Great British Recording Studios tells the story of the iconic British facilities where many of the most important recordings of all time were made. The first comprehensive account of British recording studios ever published, it was written with the cooperation of the British APRS (Association of Professional Recording Services, headed by Sir George Martin) to document the history of the major British studios of the 1960s and 1970s and to help preserve their legacy. The book surveys the era's most significant British studios (including Abbey Road, Olympic, and Trident), with complete descriptions of each studio's physical facilities and layout, along with listings of equipment and key personnel, as well as details about its best-known technical innovations and a discography of the major recordings done there. Seamlessly interweaving narrative text with behind-the-scenes anecdotes from dozens of internationally renowned record producers and a wealth of photographs (many never published before), this book brings to life the most famous British studios and the people who created magic there. Meticulously researched and organized, The Great British Recording Studios will inform and inspire students of the recording arts, music professionals, casual music fans, and anyone interested in the acoustically pristine facilities, groundbreaking techniques, and innovative artists and technicians that have shaped the course of modern recording.

Recording studios are the most insulated, intimate and privileged sites of music production and creativity. Yet in a world of intensified globalisation, they are also sites which are highly connected into wider networks of music production that are increasingly spanning the globe. This book is the first comprehensive account of the new spatialties of cultural production in the recording studio sector of the musical economy, spatialities that illuminate the complexities of global cultural production. This unique text adopts a social-geographical perspective to capture the multiple spatial scales of music production: from opening the "black-box" of the insulated space of the recording studio; through the wider contexts in which music production is situated; to the far-flung global production networks of which recording studios are part. Drawing on original research, recent writing on cultural production across a variety of academic disciplines, secondary sources such as popular music biographies, and including a wide range of case studies, this lively and accessible text covers a range of issues including the role of technology in musical creativity; creative collaboration and emotional labour; networking and reputation; and contemporary economic challenges to studios. As a contribution to contemporary debates on creativity, cultural production and creative labour, Cultural Production in and Beyond the Recording Studio will appeal to academic students and researchers working across the social sciences, including human geography, cultural studies, media and communication studies, sociology, as well as those studying music production courses.