Entertainment

The record industry is a multi-billion dollar business. Largely comprised of a handful of music conglomerates (each with a handful of labels), the record industry is essential run by huge record companies which have their own personnel to sign artists and promote their records. In addition to these huge companies are dozens of smaller independent labels who mainly release music by artists who are (in one way or the other) out of the mainstream.

The Record Industry Machine
The record industry has long controlled the production and dissemination of recorded product, primarily through record stores and, more recently, big box merchandisers like Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Target. Over the course of time, these stores have changed the way the music was sold: from vinyl records to cassette tapes, 8-tracks and (most recently) compact discs. By carefully tracking radio airplay, players in the recording industry are able to predict record sales and artist popularity.

For a long while it seemed that the record industry would always remain an impossible monopoly, with huge record labels calling the shots and assigning prices. Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on how you look at it), current technological innovations (digital recordings pressed onto compact discs) have led to the rise of online file-sharing, where the digitized music is easily transferred from one computer to the next. The incidence of illegal file-sharing now numbers in the many millions, and global record sales have fallen dramatically.

Such file sharing has led to a consolidation of the surviving major record groups and has drastically decreased their power. Fortunately for the music-lover, legal online music sites (such as Apples iTunes, Napster and others) are starting to generate some of that lost potential income, and the record industry as a whole, is starting to turn around. Regardless of the medium, there is no question that the record industry will continue to rise.