Record Labels

1)      The current biggest companies within music are: Sony Music Entertainment, EMI, Warner Music and Universal Music.

2)       Universal is the largest company with 31.71% of the music produced in 2005.
Sony are the second largest company with 25.61% of the music produced in 2005.
Warner are the third largest company with 15% of the music produced in 2005.
EMI are the fourth largest company with 9.55% of the music produced in 2005.
These four companies account for 81.87% of the US market in 2005. This meant that these companies pretty much controlled all of the music that would be heard on the radio.

3)       The benefits for the big companies of having such a huge market share is that they could keep producing money making artists by modelling them and their songs on current trends. This would mean that they would retain their hold on the market and would easily control what music would be heard.

4)      The problems that these large companies are causing are that the huge number of artists that they cover are being groomed and turned into a money making device. The music is now specifically made to be main stream and thus to create money. This is killing a lot of hte creativity that music is supposed to contain, and so has a backlash on the audience as we only get to listen to the music that the record companies allow us.

5)      The future looks pretty unknown. Due to the website Spotify, which allows users to listen to whatever songs they want for free, as a giant database of thousands of songs is stored? This could become extremely popular as it saves audiences a huge amount of money on purchasing the music, but could potentially be as bad as piracy, in that the music industry and companies won’t be receiving as much income as if the audience bought the music.