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Inside the Music Industry’s High-Stakes A.I. Experiments

By John Seabrook

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Sir Lucian Grainge, the chairman and C.E.O. of Universal Music Group, the largest music company in the world, is curious, empathetic, and, if not exactly humble, a master of the humblebrag. His superpower is his humanity. A sixty-three-year-old Englishman, who was knighted in 2016 for his contributions to the music industry and has topped Billboard’s Power 100 list of music-industry players several times in the past decade, Grainge is compact and a bit chubby, with alert eyes behind owlish glasses. He isn’t trying to be noticed. He presides over a public company worth more than fifty billion dollars, but he could be a small-business owner who sells music in a London shop, as did his father, Cecil. On earnings calls, Grainge can sound more like a London taxi dispatcher than a chief executive. But woe to those who mistake his European civility for a lack of competitive fire. “He is so deceptive with that little kind face and those little glasses,” Doug Morris, the previous chairman of UMG, told the Financial Times in 2003, when he was still Grainge’s boss. “Behind them, he is actually a killer shark.” In 2011, Grainge devoured Morris’s job.

As UMG’s leader, he has solidified the dominance of Universal, the largest of the Big Three label groups, helping it to overtake Warner Music and Sony. More than half of Spotify ’s twenty most streamed artists of all time are signed to UMG. But Grainge is also the consummate music man, with forty-five years of experience on both the publishing and the label sides of the business. He oversees a long list of formerly independent labels, including Interscope, Republic, Capitol, Motown, and Island. “Lucian’s like the league commissioner,” Monte Lipman, who founded Republic with his brother Avery, told me. Don Was, the head of Blue Note, UMG’s storied jazz label, said, “He’s the smartest motherfucker in the music business, period. He can operate in the artistic world, and he can operate in the financial world, which are two very different beasts.”

Grainge lives and works in Los Angeles, but West Coast fitness culture has yet to make a convert of him. He neither skis nor golfs, although he sometimes drives the cart for other golfers, doing business between holes. He doesn’t drink or smoke, and, as for drugs, “I panic when I have to take an aspirin,” he has said. He is a family man whose first wife, Samantha Berg, suffered complications while giving birth to their son, Elliot, in 1993, and spent the remaining years of her life in a coma—a profound loss that has colored his world view as much as any professional experience. In March, 2020, Grainge was among the first wave of people in L.A. to contract COVID , and he nearly died, spending eighteen days on a ventilator. After recovering, he told me in his office last November, he had survivor’s guilt. “Why me?” he kept asking himself.

Grainge’s son, Elliot, now thirty and a record man himself (his label, 10K Projects, signed the Gen Z sensation Ice Spice), told me, “We’re not from Hollywood.” He added, of his father, “He doesn’t put on a show, a façade, like so many people out here do—there’s a total difference of personality. He’s from an insular Jewish community in North London. He has a village mentality.”

Still, music has made Grainge a very rich villager. One British music executive told me, “Winning means more to him than to almost anyone else I have met in the music business”; money is just a way of keeping score. Although Grainge’s annual salary—five million dollars—is relatively modest for his position, he received a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar bonus for successfully taking UMG public, in 2021. Some shareholders objected to the size of this “transition” compensation, deeming it “excessive.” In the U.K., Grainge’s pay package was even discussed in Parliament, in the context of a proposed bill that was promoting equity in the music business. A Conservative M.P., Esther McVey, said, “It’s shocking that record-label owners are earning more out of artists’ works than the artists themselves.”

Grainge lives in a mansion in Pacific Palisades with his second wife, Caroline, whom he married in 2002, and with whom he has raised a daughter, Alice, and a stepdaughter, Betsy. When he got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, in 2020, Lionel Richie—a longtime Universal artist, and the father of Elliot’s wife, Sofia—honored him at the ceremony. (“That’s a real copyright!” Grainge exclaimed to me approvingly about Richie’s evergreen tune “Hello.” “A wedding and bar-mitzvah song!”) He is highly regarded both by UMG’s artists and by the company’s investors, an extraordinarily difficult twofer to pull off.

His old friend Bono , whose band, U2, is on Island, told me, “Lucian doesn’t do varnish. If you’re looking for varnish from Lucian, you’d better be drinking it. He is exactly as he appears.” He added, “People like us are practiced in the art of dizziness, and the music business can be a dizzy world. But for those of us who like to know where the doors, walls, and windows are, facts are friendly, and they’re more friendly if they don’t come with the kind of back-slapping, white-crowned varnish”—the kind with which music executives often treat artists. Bono did an impression of Grainge for me. “Can’t do it, mate!’’ he barked. “No! Will not. Not gonna happen!” He added that, as a musician, “I feel very comfortable when I know who I’m in the room with, when I don’t have to negotiate with a Janus-faced man.”

Which is not to say that Grainge is always easy to understand. He favors off-the-wall analogies, often involving cars, which he collects. When Grainge first met the English singer-songwriter Jamie Cullum, he declared, “Jamie! You’re like a Formula 1 sausage roll,” an exchange that has been captured for posterity in a cartoon Cullum drew that hangs on a wall outside Grainge’s office. “He talks in riddles, which I find endearing,” Jody Gerson, who runs UMG’s global publishing company, told me. “Weird historical British references, Yiddish things, and every now and then he’ll say, ‘Do you know what I mean?’ And I’m, like, Do I admit that I don’t? He once said to me, ‘Jody, I think like a jazz musician. I don’t always know exactly how I’m getting there, but I know where I’m going to end up.’ Lucian knows what he’s doing at all times, and that’s his process.”

Among investors, Grainge is seen as an executive whose strategic use of technology has reshaped the industry’s business model. At an investor presentation in 2021, Bill Ackman, whose hedge fund, Pershing Square Capital Management, owns ten per cent of UMG, compared Grainge’s impact on the music business to that of Netflix’s Reed Hastings on the TV and film industry; he has also likened Grainge to Walt Disney and Steve Jobs. Irving Azoff, of Full Stop Management, told me that Grainge, who attracted Ackman’s fund and the Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent, which owns twenty per cent of UMG, had created a global investor base to match the company’s roster of global superstars. That, in turn, had enhanced the value of the music industry as a whole, “which had always been traditionally undervalued,” Azoff said.

In the course of Grainge’s forty-five years in the business, everything about the way people create, sell, and consume music has changed. Distribution, once a mainstay—you needed labels to physically get records into stores—has become as easy as hitting an Upload button. Promotion of new music, which labels once controlled by way of radio d.j.s, now occurs on streaming platforms, where algorithms determine playlists. Product lives in the cloud, and revenues, formerly derived from sales of albums and singles, have given way to regular royalty payouts from streaming services. Music executives, who used to come up in the record business, like Grainge and Rob Stringer, the head of Sony Music, are now as likely to be lawyers, private-equity managers, turnaround specialists, or tech leaders—such as Robert Kyncl, the recently appointed C.E.O. of Warner Music Group, who was previously an executive at YouTube.

And yet, unlike print media, television, and film—other creative industries that have struggled to adapt to similar digital transformations—the music industry, after a severe contraction in the first decade of the century, now appears to be more profitable than ever. Streaming revenues alone reportedly surpassed seventeen billion dollars in 2022. It was arguably Grainge who, more than any other executive, defied the grim prognostications of the industry’s imminent demise in the early two-thousands. How did he manage it? After all, even though UMG controls the content, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, et al. own the technology.

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“It’s called a ‘wriggle,’ ” Grainge, in his large sixth-floor corner office, told me on a gray November day. He sat at an oblong table with his back to the window, which faces east toward downtown Santa Monica. A guitar signed by Amy Winehouse was nearby. He held out his hand and wriggled it, his fingers moving like fish nosing through coral. “You’re going to have to figure out if you’re going to go above, beneath, around the side, or through.”

In March, 2023, Neal Mohan, who had just become the C.E.O. of YouTube, received a message from Grainge that said, “Hey Neal, congratulations, when can we meet?” Mohan told me, “It was typical Lucian in that it was warm and friendly, but it was clear that he had real urgency in his request to talk.” The subject was A.I.

A. & R. scouts are said to have ears, and Grainge sports an impressive pair of aural appendages that move up and down the sides of his head when he’s talking. But Grainge uses his nose. “I’ve always been able to smell intuitively what the next scene is,” he said. “Whether it’s punk or New Romantics, I’ve always enjoyed it, picked up on it, and this is my view of technology.” Generative A.I., which can produce novel images, text, and music, smelled to him like the next big scene. “That’s all I am—a talent scout.”

The industry is facing yet another revolution, but what sort isn’t yet clear. Is A.I. a format change in the way music is consumed, like the transition from records and cassettes to CDs, or is it a threat to the business model, as were free downloading and file-sharing? Is generative A.I. a new kind of digital workstation for making music, or is it the new radio—a platform for promoting acts and engaging with fans? Is a new era of musical invention at hand, or will A.I. cripple human creativity?

In April of 2023, an anonymous producer called ghostwriter used A.I. voice replications of Drake and the Weeknd to create a deepfake duet called “ Heart on My Sleeve .” The “Fake Drake” song quickly went viral, sending waves of fear through the industry; Universal’s stock fell by roughly twenty per cent between February and mid-May, over concerns about generative A.I. eroding the value of its copyrights. (The stock has since recovered, and is near an all-time high.) Grainge invited me to imagine an illegitimate version of a Kanye West song featuring Taylor Swift’s voice: “Get your head around that. And then it’s ingested into one of the platforms and someone starts monetizing it.” He added, “I haven’t spent forty-five years in the industry just to have it be a free-for-all where anything goes. Not going to happen while I’m still here!” At the same time, he didn’t want to miss out, in case A.I.-generated material became a new source of revenue for artists—and their labels.

Before Mohan’s appointment, YouTube, which is owned by Google, had developed several key music-related products: paid-subscription services and Content ID, an automated way to detect copyrighted music on the platform. These products dramatically altered YouTube’s relationship with the music industry, turning the lawless wasteland of the early twenty-first century into the industry’s Elysian Fields. Between July, 2021, and June, 2022, YouTube paid more than six billion dollars to rights holders globally.

Last spring, Grainge flew to San Bruno, south of San Francisco, where YouTube is based. This was around the time that people in nearly every content industry were awakening to the fact that Google, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI were scraping material of all kinds from the Internet to use in training their A.I. models. As lawyers in all those content businesses mulled suing for copyright infringement, Grainge’s instinct was to play with the technology. It was the same approach he had taken to music streaming. “He experiments early,” Daniel Ek, a founder of Spotify, told me. “So then the cost isn’t as huge later, because you’re not betting the farm on everything you’re trying to do.”

DeepMind, Google’s artificial-intelligence research lab in London, had been working on generative-A.I. music technology. One model—which Google later dubbed Lyria—was just emerging from the lab, and Mohan and his colleagues were beginning to ponder how to put it to use. He welcomed Grainge’s input. “I remember in one of our first conversations Lucian said we need a constitution,” Mohan recalled. Working with YouTube colleagues, Mohan came up with three “principles”: a commitment to the “responsible” use of A.I. in collaboration with music partners; a pledge to continue refining safety protocols and guardrails; and systems that would help counteract trademark and copyright abuse. Google has created a tool called SynthID, which can watermark and detect synthetically generated content.

Still, it seemed highly likely that music-generating A.I.s had been trained on at least some copyrighted material, without a license. In experimenting with the technology, would Grainge be implicitly endorsing the scraping that UMG’s lawyers could potentially go to court to stop? Grainge told me that the industry’s historical response to engaging with tech companies had been fear. “The lawyers have done what’s necessary to protect us,” he said. “But if a strategy is only seen through the lens of what can go wrong, the people running the business become scared and paralyzed. Well, I don’t do scared.”

“I always say that the music industry chooses you,” Grainge told me. In the nineteen-fifties, his father, Cecil, was the proprietor of GrAInge, a North London record shop and appliance retailer. (The “AI” in the logo was uppercased, a spooky coincidence.) Grainge has an early memory of watching his father shave while he whistled “Hey Jude”: “How is it he’s not cutting himself? He couldn’t stop whistling that melody.” Music was always playing in the house. “I’d get woken up to Neil Diamond, the ‘Radetzky March,’ Fats Domino, lots of Ray Charles,” he said.

“It’s in the blood,” Irving Azoff said of being in a music family; both of his sons are in the industry. “Being around it your whole life, you get a perspective you couldn’t learn in business school.”

Grainge’s half brother Nigel, thirteen years his senior, had begun a career in music that would eventually lead to his signing Sinéad O’Connor, the Waterboys, Thin Lizzy, 10cc, and Bob Geldof’s band, the Boomtown Rats, to his record label, Ensign, which he founded in 1976. He took Lucian, still in his mid-teens, to see the Ramones on their first U.K. tour. Grainge also saw the Sex Pistols and the Stranglers, among other punk acts, and hung out in a derelict house where the Damned rehearsed. He loved it all, including being gobbed on at gigs. “I had a jacket covered with saliva,” he said. “I used to leave it on a heap on the floor.” He also learned to pogo. “Because I was normally the shortest one at the club, people would use me to pogo off,” he said. “When Bob Geldof got smacked in the mouth at the Music Machine”—a venue in Camden Town—“and lost his front teeth, the guy who did it pogoed off my shoulders.” (Geldof, who has also been knighted in the intervening years, recalled the young Grainge as “kind of annoying, in a little brother way,” but clarified that, although his lip was bruised and his nose bloodied that night, no teeth went missing.)

When Grainge was seventeen, a talent agent in Soho hired him as a sandwich guy, the lowliest gofer. He balanced work with study at Queen Elizabeth’s School, a venerable institution for boys in North London, established in 1573. His mother, Marion, a certified public accountant, was keen for her son to go to university; Grainge didn’t see the point. He agreed to take his A-level exams, but during one of the tests a proctor admonished him for wearing red shoes instead of black ones, which Grainge was said to have been “really fucked off” about. He walked out of the exam and later that day signed a producer to the agency he worked for. His mother was livid; his father, who had left school at age fourteen, didn’t care. (Years later, when Elliot told his father that he wasn’t planning on attending college, Grainge wouldn’t hear of it. Elliot graduated from Northeastern.)

In 1979, Maurice Oberstein, an American record man who helped build CBS Records U.K. into a powerhouse in the late seventies, hired Grainge as an A. & R. scout on the publishing side. A towering figure in the British music industry, Obie, as Oberstein was called, appeared to enjoy making visitors uncomfortable by behaving eccentrically, bringing his dog to meetings and pretending that he was listening to the canine’s advice. “Obie was one of the most brilliant record executives I ever met,” Grainge told me. “He absolutely terrified me and most of the people around him.” (Grainge has been known to have a similar effect at times. “It’s how he tests you,” John Janick, the head of Interscope, told me.)

In 1979, Grainge signed the Psychedelic Furs to a writing contract, mainly because of their song “Sister Europe,” which hadn’t yet been released. He spent a decade in publishing, traditionally the more conservative wing of the business: while the labels focus on breaking new acts, publishing favors a measured approach, building long-term value in evergreens. As a “song guy,” Grainge acted as a consultant to writer-performers he signed, and developed material for established artists who didn’t write. In 1982, he became the director of R.C.A.’s publishing arm, where he signed the Eurythmics. Grainge told me, of signing acts in those days, “All I needed was a Walkman, a park bench, and a checkbook. The rest is bullshit.” Mike Caren, a longtime record executive formerly at Warner, told me, “Working with artists and songwriters is the closest you can be to the creative process.”

Grainge’s early years in the business were a fertile time in music. Punk taught him about the power of a “scene,” Grainge’s shorthand for the way a musical subculture can fuse with fashion, art, media, and politics to change mainstream culture. As hip-hop, one such scene, emerged in the U.S., Grainge observed how technology, in the form of early samplers and drum machines, could enfranchise artists who lacked access to instruments, music lessons, and studios. The rise of New Wave bands, which eclipsed punk, schooled Grainge in how transient scenes can be. One minute he was getting spit on by lads in ripped tees, “and then I wake up and I’m with Steve Strange”—the dandyish front man of the band Visage—“and all the guys look like girls. And the saliva is gone.” That’s why he wasn’t alarmed, years later, when streaming disrupted the industry. “I feel exactly the same with music in the cloud. Everything’s disruption, disruption, change, change. I’m used to disruption.”

By the early eighties, formerly independent labels that were run by their founders—such as Chris Blackwell’s Island and Ahmet Ertegun’s Atlantic—had begun to attract Wall Street interest, thanks in part to the enormous success of records like Peter Frampton’s double album “Frampton Comes Alive!,” on A&M. Labels began merging, to increase market share, offset distribution costs, and spread risk. In 1986, Grainge joined PolyGram, a Dutch-German entertainment company that had expanded into the U.S. and the U.K., to launch a publishing division. He acquired the rights to the catalogues of artists like Elton John, recognizing how valuable copyrights would be in the burgeoning CD era, with the repackaging of older work. That acumen would prove crucial in the streaming age, as catalogues replaced new hits as the primary source of income; one report showed that catalogues represented about seventy per cent of the U.S. music market in 2021.

Toward the end of his publishing career, Grainge was involved in one of the most renowned catalogue rejuvenations ever. In 1992, PolyGram released “ABBA Gold,” a greatest-hits collection. After the band split up, in 1982, “we thought it was finished,” Björn Ulvaeus, who wrote the Swedish foursome’s songs with Benny Andersson, told me. “I really believed that. Oh, they might play the odd song, with a reference to the seventies, perhaps, but that’s it.” Grainge, working with his colleagues John Kennedy and David Hockman, was instrumental in rebranding the band for a new generation. “It became a huge hit,” Ulvaeus said of “ABBA Gold.” “I have to thank those guys. They saw something else.”

The following January, Grainge moved over to the label side, becoming the head of A. & R. and business affairs at Polydor, a PolyGram label. It had done well with the Bee Gees in the seventies but now had a roster of waning artists. Grainge helped turn things around by signing acts like the Cure, Take That, the Cardigans, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But it was when he was at Polydor that Grainge’s private life was torn apart, after his wife, Samantha Berg, suffered an amniotic-fluid embolism while giving birth to Elliot. “In the space of an hour, I lost my wife and became a father for the first time,” he told me. “It’s the worst thing that could happen to someone. I had a son to raise, and that became my priority. I became braver. In my professional life, I suppose it enabled me to confront challenges as well as risk with a different mindset, in a way I might not otherwise have had.”

In 1997, he became the managing director, a job transition that Grainge now considers the most daunting in his career. At the time, CD sales were driving the industry to new heights, and record companies were growing ever larger. In 1995, the Canadian conglomerate Seagram, led by Edgar Bronfman, Jr., an heir to the Seagram’s liquor fortune, had acquired the MCA Music Entertainment Group, and the following year renamed the company Universal Music Group. Two years later, Seagram bought PolyGram. In 2000, Seagram was sold to the French media company Vivendi. Grainge rode this merry-go-round of mergers and acquisitions to greater power. Bronfman appointed him head of Universal Music U.K. in 2001, and he took over UMG International in 2005. Unfortunately, his ascendancy came just as the industry that he had grown up with was facing extinction.

In the fifteen years after the pioneering file-sharing service Napster launched, in 1999, worldwide music revenues declined more than forty per cent. Thousands of people lost their jobs. In 2004, Grainge assembled his senior executives in the company’s boardroom in London. He sat in silence until they all were seated, and then he got up and switched off the lights. “This is what’s going to happen to the company unless you get some hits and fucking fix file-sharing,” he said, and walked out. (Bono, who had heard about this famous meeting, did his Grainge impersonation when he gave his account: “Roight! Get used to the dahk!”)

Per Sundin, a record executive in Sweden, recalled meeting Grainge in 2009: “I said, ‘We’re firing people like crazy, and there’s no upside coming.’ And Lucian was totally positive. His confidence—about music, songs, and songwriters, but also about the future—was contagious. This is a guy who doesn’t fear anyone.”

In 2007, Grainge and Nokia made one of the first “all you can eat” music deals: buy the phone and download as much UMG music as you want for a year. Such deals are now the norm. “The fact is that much of the industry was scared to make the shift to an access model,” he told me. “And I understand why. When your whole existence has been based on a wholesale retail-transaction model, a fundamental shift like that can be terrifying.”

Daniel Ek, of Spotify, met Grainge the same year. “A lot of people at that time were trying to protect their jobs,” Ek told me. “But Lucian’s view was, How do I protect music, regardless of what happens to me?” Ek believed that a free, ad-supported model for music streaming would act as a “funnel” to bring in users and then convert them to paying subscribers, through premium features. But free music was a non-starter for Edgar Bronfman, who by then was C.E.O. of Warner Music Group. (In 2004, Bronfman had led a group of investors who acquired WMG from Time Warner.) “Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry, and, as far as Warner Music is concerned, will not be licensed,” he said at the time.

Grainge didn’t love the idea of free music, either. Yet he supported Ek’s vision, and was instrumental in getting Spotify licensed in the U.S., in 2011. But the free tier remained contentious (and still is). Ek recalled a particularly difficult negotiation a few years later over renewing the license, which was set to expire. “I was running up against the clock, both sides were threatening each other, and I was kind of getting stressed out,” Ek told me. His partner, Sofia Levander, was about to give birth to their first child. “Lucian called me up,” he went on. “I was expecting him to scream at me, ‘You’ve got twenty-four hours!’ But what he actually said was, ‘I just heard that you’re about to become a father. I’ve been in this situation myself, where it was really difficult in my professional career. You know what, I’m just going to renew the existing deal as is for two months. Go have your baby, take it easy, we will sort it out somehow.’ He had no financial reason for doing that. In fact, it would probably have been better for him to wear me out while I was going through a lot of hardship.” He added, “And when I came back we sat together and worked it out.”

Bronfman recently described the tough stance that he took with Ek in the early days of streaming. “I said, ‘Look, Daniel, you will have people on the free tier forever—that’s just not right,’ ” he told me. But, he added, “Lucian was more the leader and I was the outlier.” Grainge’s approach to A.I. today, Bronfman believes, is “very consistent” with his initial approach to streaming. “He has always wanted to enable technologies,” Bronfman said. “He doesn’t want to shut them down, but he doesn’t want to give them entirely free rein until he has a better understanding of their potential, either to grow or harm the industry.”

In 2011, Grainge became the head of global UMG, which was based in New York, after spending six months as co-C.E.O. with Doug Morris. He decided to relocate the company to L.A., in part to be closer to Silicon Valley, and in part to establish a new power base away from New York and Morris’s loyalists. Although the unique cultures of the formerly independent labels had mostly disappeared by the twenty-first century, Grainge, like Morris before him, sought to revive the entrepreneurial spirit that made them successful in the first place, encouraging UMG label heads to compete not only with outside labels but with one another. He told me that he had learned from Obie the importance of “surrounding oneself with brilliant creative executives,” and that “they needed to be treated like artists themselves.” Interscope’s John Janick, whom Grainge helped bring in to succeed Jimmy Iovine, told me, “I’m an employee here, but he makes me feel like I’m building the company I run.”

Eleven months into his tenure as UMG’s chairman, Grainge made a huge wager on the future of music and on his own career. EMI, the British music conglomerate—home to the Beatles and Queen—had gone bankrupt after a disastrous sale of its assets to Guy Hands, a British private-equity investor who thought that he knew how to run a record company.

In what could now be called one of the biggest bargains of all time, Grainge bought the company from Citibank for $1.9 billion. Competitors raised antitrust concerns; Congress held a hearing, where Bronfman said that the merger would create “one innovation-stifling dominant player”; and the European Commission issued a two-hundred-page statement of objection. Citibank sold EMI’s publishing arm to Sony. Grainge sold some of the labels, including Ensign, his brother Nigel’s former label, to appease the regulators. (Nigel died in 2017, at the age of seventy, owing to complications from surgery.)

“I would take ‘innovation stifling’ out,” Bronfman said, when I asked him how he felt about his testimony today.

UMG’s larger market share enhanced Grainge’s leverage with the tech companies. When it comes to a wriggle, scale matters. “I’m negotiating with companies whose value runs into the trillions,” Grainge told me. “In that sense, we’re a minnow.” He forged the first licensing deal between a major record company and a social platform, when he entered into an agreement with Facebook, in 2017. In the past decade, YouTube, Snapchat, Amazon, Peloton, and any number of gaming companies, fitness apps, and purveyors of online karaoke have come to Grainge seeking licensing deals. “I was around for some of that,” Neil Jacobson, a former president of Geffen Records, which is part of Interscope, told me. “It’s the greatest negotiation in the history of the music business. He knew how to play one against the other.” Azoff observed, “He deserves full credit for knocking down these walls and making them start dealing with us, but he would be the first to say the fight’s far from over.”

Grainge starts each year with a memo to the UMG staff—the music-industry equivalent of Warren Buffett’s annual letter to his shareholders. His January, 2023, epistle to UMG’s ten thousand employees began with chest thumping over the company’s domination of the charts, with tracks by Taylor Swift, the Weeknd, Feid, Karol G, Lana Del Rey, Morgan Wallen, Olivia Rodrigo, the Rolling Stones, and Drake, who on the 2021 Migos song “Having Our Way” dropped the chairman’s name:

Shit done changed Billionaires talk to me different When they see my paystub from Lucian Grainge.

Then Grainge turned to “content oversupply,” as he referred to it. In spite of the popularity of the company’s superstars (several of the most followed people on social media are Universal artists), UMG’s over-all share of the streaming market is declining, as is that of the other label groups. A decade ago, according to a study published by Bank of America, major labels were responsible for about ninety per cent of the content on streaming platforms; today, their share is roughly ten per cent. YouTube and TikTok have allowed emerging artists to monetize their careers without major-label help. Ice Spice, Jack Harlow, and Lil Nas X, for instance, owe their ascendancy to social media.

Grainge grew up in an industry in which labels were the only game in town. Now the platforms are clogged with aspiring musicians, hoping that an algorithm will notice them. In a report last year, the research company Luminate said that, of the hundred and eighty-four million tracks available on streaming platforms, 86.2 per cent received fewer than a thousand plays, and 24.8 per cent—45.6 million tracks—had zero plays. It seems that Spotify, which in many ways could be considered the Netflix of music, has also become something like Friendster: a place for amateurs to post homemade work for friends.

In Grainge’s view, this oversupply is “getting in the way of real talent and real songwriters,” he told me. Many of the hundred and twenty thousand new tracks flooding into streaming platforms each day aren’t songs at all; they’re “functional music” designed for exercising, concentrating, or sleeping, including such bangers as “Baby White Noise” and “Rain on Windshield.” Endel, a prominent functional-music company, has estimated that there are as many as fifteen billion streams of these tracks a month. In our conversations, Grainge pointed to a vacuum sound that had recently risen to No. 7 on the Swiss music charts. A.I. was likely to vastly increase what he called the “sea of noise.” (In May, 2023, in another kind of wriggle, Grainge himself entered the market, when UMG announced a partnership with Endel that would allow UMG artists to use A.I. to make functional versions of their songs.)

The payment system that was being used by Spotify and other platforms—a pro-rata model that Grainge helped create—paid a share of the aggregate royalties to labels based on the percentage of the total that their artists’ streams represented. The labels were then responsible for paying out the artists’ share. It galled Grainge that all streams were valued the same, whether it was Drake or a dripping faucet. A pro-rata model also didn’t account for the added value of major acts, which drive people to pay, and stay subscribed to, premium streaming services. As Monte Lipman put it to me, “With these superstar artists, when they set a release date, you see these sharp spikes in the streaming space, and you don’t necessarily see that with rainwater hitting the windshield.”

In his letter, Grainge called for a new “artist-centric” model that would value legitimate artists at a higher rate. It is a measure of his clout that by the time his 2024 letter came out, in early January, Spotify and several other platforms were adopting key aspects of this model. The French streaming service Deezer, for example, now counts an instance of someone searching for and listening to a song—rather than listening after it has been served up by an algorithm—as two streams. On Spotify, tracks must have a thousand plays in a year before they can start generating revenue. “Is it fair?” Daniel Glass, who heads the indie label Glassnote, said. “No. But Lucian did the right thing for the music industry.”

I asked Grainge how he could be sure that one of those hundred and twenty thousand new songs that crop up every day might not be the next hit.

“How are you going to find that?” he said. “There’s too much stuff! And it is just stuff.”

In June of 2023, Mohan arranged for a demonstration of the nascent Lyria for Grainge and several members of his team, at Grainge’s home. Prompted by a text command, Lyria generated an instrumental version of the melody of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” in the style of John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things.” It was impressive, but Grainge wasn’t surprised. He had seen this kind of thing before, back in the early eighties, when synthesizers, samplers, and drum machines became especially popular. “Everyone said it was the end back then,” he observed.

Michael Nash, UMG’s chief digital officer, and Will Tanous, the chief administrative officer, attended the meeting. “I don’t mean to be a wet blanket,” Tanous said after the demo ended, “but there’s a huge section of the artist community that won’t be down with this.” Musicians were growing anxious about what A.I. might do to their careers.

YouTube and UMG discussed the idea of an “artist incubator.” Songwriters, performers, producers, and rights holders would experiment with the technology and give Google feedback, including any concerns. By August, the incubator was up and running. Participants included Don Was, Björn Ulvaeus, the artist Rosanne Cash, the composer Max Richter, the rapper Yo Gotti, the OneRepublic front man Ryan Tedder, and representatives of the estate of Frank Sinatra.

In October, Don Was told me about his session with Lyria. He prompted the model with the name of a famous artist, a legendary singer-songwriter he had worked with in the past, asking for a song about his first car. The DeepMind team suggested adding the command “produced by Don Was.” The A.I. generated four different fragments of songs about cars, all with lyrics, melodies, and orchestration, and sung in the A.I.-generated voice of the artist, which had been learned from YouTube videos. Was described the experience as “a combination of awe and terror simultaneously.” His first thought was “This is better than anything I could have done.” His second was “I could collaborate with myself on my very best day.” For that reason, he told himself, “the songwriters are going to like this more than anybody, as long as you can’t steal from them.” He imagines an A.I. that has been trained on an artist’s complete works, and which other songwriters could collaborate with, for a fee. The songwriter, he mused, “gets paid, and he can put his name on the song if he likes it, take it off if he doesn’t.”

DeepMind representatives met with Ulvaeus in Stockholm; he later spent a day at DeepMind, in London. “I can only describe it as an extension of my mind,” Ulvaeus told me. I quoted Was’s line about writing with yourself on your “very best day.” “Exactly,” Ulvaeus replied. He talked about hearing the Beatles on the radio as a young man. “We kind of trained on that,” he said. “And, when we started writing, all of those references—we used them for inspiration.” But the A.I. would be able to reference so much more than he had. “Every songwriter in the world would subscribe to that service if it was good enough,” he said. He’d also started to think about monetization. “The A.I. models would have a heap of money like Spotify does, and that money could be distributed back to songwriters and labels according to consumption,” he suggested, adding, “It’s a blunt instrument, but that’s one way of doing it.”

It’s possible that questions over copyright and monetization could take years to sort out. By that point, the A.I. version of an artist might not need her anymore, once it has learned everything there is to learn about her style. And who would own the output: the prompter of the A.I. or the artist whose style was the inspiration? “I have to accept that the prompter gets a copyright,” Ulvaeus said. “It sounds radical, but I see no other way.”

But why was training a song-generating A.I. like Lyria any different from the way that he and Benny Andersson had drawn on their memories of listening to the Beatles in making their hits? Because, as Ulvaeus pointed out to me, the Beatles music that they heard was licensed and paid for.

When I asked Grainge whether licensing the music used for training A.I.s was the way forward, he offered an automobile analogy. “If only it were as simple as buying a car: ‘This is what the manufacturing cost is, this is what the taxes are,’ ” he said. “This is more like building a car, so it’s far too early for me to discuss business models.” He added, “But it’s in my bones to try and be ahead.”

When I met with Grainge in California, YouTube was about to announce an experimental venture called Dream Track. A select group of a hundred YouTube creators would get to use the A.I.-generated voices and songwriting styles of nine well-known singer-songwriters, three of them from UMG—John Legend, Demi Lovato, and Troye Sivan—to create YouTube Shorts of up to thirty seconds. Four Warner artists would also be involved: Alec Benjamin, Charlie Puth, Charli XCX, and Sia. And T-Pain and the rapper Papoose rounded out the group. As Lyor Cohen, YouTube’s global music head, explained in a blog post about the experiment, the creators would simply have to type an idea into the creation prompt and select one of the artists from a carrousel in order to produce a unique soundtrack for their Shorts.

For Grainge, Dream Track represented an unusually bold collaboration between a content colossus and a tech superpower, in an effort to determine how to monetize synthetic vocals. Among other possible applications, Grainge was curious how the technology could be used to create new iterations of hit songs which would be sung in different languages by A.I.-generated versions of the artists’ voices. In the U.S., artists own their voices and likenesses, which are protected not by copyright but by the “right of publicity.” After Fake Drake appeared, last April, people were using services like Voicify to flood streaming platforms with tracks that replicated artists’ voices and songwriting styles without permission. UMG issued thousands of takedown notices, but efforts were complicated because right-of-publicity statutes exist only at the state level. UMG has lobbied Congress for a federal right of publicity, and a recent bipartisan bill, the No AI Fraud Act, aims to protect artists’ voices under federal intellectual-property law. “I personally think legislation is critical,” Grainge told me. He sees the unlicensed use of A.I.-generated voices and styles “as a form of identity theft.” It’s “immoral,” he said.

One day, Grainge invited me to tag along to a meeting with his “creative SWAT team” to discuss both Dream Track and the artist incubator. In a conference room called ABBA—each meeting room in the building is named for a famous UMG artist or act—seven men and one woman were waiting at a long table, with the empty chair at the head reserved for Grainge. He began by noting that this was a limited experiment. Rigid controls were in place so that the users couldn’t, say, prompt the John Legend A.I. to sing a hymn to terrorists. The output is closely monitored by YouTube and watermarked using SynthID.

“Sometimes you need a Snickers bar to get to the filet mignon, to stop you from driving into a concrete pillar and killing yourself along the way,” Grainge remarked, in a typically tortured analogy. He was particularly concerned that a superstar artist might object to UMG’s involvement in a generative-A.I. experiment with Google. Bad Bunny had recently declared, to fans listening to an unauthorized deepfake track that used his voice, “You don’t deserve to be my friends.”

Grainge went on, “I can just hear it—‘I don’t fuck with A.I.!’ ” He added, “We have to be ready. Let’s not be afraid. Let’s just be prepared.”

The discussion turned to the incubator. Dickon Stainer, UMG’s global head of classical music and jazz, who was joining the meeting by Zoom from London, reported that his artist Max Richter was delighted to be invited into the incubator. “He’s been through all the format changes, from albums to CDs, CDs to downloads, downloads to streaming, and he feels he was powerless to affect any of that,” Stainer said. “And all of a sudden he feels like he can be in the middle of the conversation.”

It was late in London. “Do you have your p.j.’s on under that shirt, Dickon?” Grainge called out, with a laugh. “The ones with the little animals on them?”

“I’ve been out to a gig!” Stainer replied.

Grainge wrapped up the meeting with a couple more metaphors. “I don’t think this will be plain sailing,” he said. “It’s like going to the dentist. ‘If you experience any pain, let me know and I’ll stop immediately.’ That’s what this is.”

The larger question of whether copyrighted material can be used as training data for A.I. is far from settled. In October, Universal Music Publishing Group and other prominent publishers sued the A.I. company Anthropic—the creator of Claude, a “next generation AI assistant for your tasks, no matter the scale”—for systematic and widespread infringement of copyrighted material in the training of Claude and in its potential output. Both sides submitted written responses to the U.S. Copyright Office on several topics, including fair use and copyright. Anthropic maintains that its A.I. uses a vast body of work, of which lyrics are one small element, to build a statistical model of the way language functions.

In reference to the overarching challenges posed by generative A.I., UMG argued in its submission to the Copyright Office that “the wholesale appropriation of UMG’s enormous catalog of copyright-protected sound recordings and musical compositions to build multibillion commercial enterprises . . . is simply theft on an unprecedented scale.” Jonathan King, a copyright lawyer who worked on the submission, told me, “One of the principles of fair use is that authors ought to be allowed to build upon the work of other authors in some circumstances. But that’s not how A.I. works. A.I. uses copyrighted materials to emulate human authorship. The machine is not an author, in the traditional sense of a creative and expressive human being, because it is just synthesizing an imitation of human content, derived from algorithms that study and try to sound like human authors.”

Grainge wasn’t waiting for the courts to decide what constitutes fair use. Recalling the first decade of file-sharing, he said, “If we had waited for the tech companies to finish innovating, we would have ended up as roadkill.”

“I ’m never really apprehensive about anything,” Grainge told me of his exploratory A.I. ventures. I had raised the question of whether he could really trust Google, since the company’s long-term interests may lie in giving its users the tools to close the gap between wannabes and real artists by making it possible for anyone to create a fully orchestrated song by typing in a prompt or even whistling a melody. A tsunami of noise could be coming.

Grainge doesn’t indulge in such existential fears. “The things that make me apprehensive,” he said, “are when people can’t see around the corners and the bends.” He made the swimming motion with his hand again. “Technology has served the industry very well,” he went on. “From sheet music to upright pianos to big bands and the huge CBS radio network in the U.S. that was going to destroy fledging shellac sales. In the eighties, Linn drum machines, 808s, the Fairlight synthesizer—we’ve always been served very well.” In any case, he added, there was no point in fighting generative A.I. “What are we going to do?” When a company the size of Google is “making an investment in developing products and tools,” he said, “my view is, as an industry, we need to be the hostess with the mostest.”

Grainge mentioned new health-and-wellness projects that UMG was pursuing with a couple of startups, according to research on how music affects the brain. “If you’ve ever been in a ward with brain-injury patients, as I have, unfortunately,” Grainge said, pausing for a second before continuing, “the music-therapy person is like the guy in a Mexican restaurant who goes around and plays at your table. I thought, How can we use the technology—headphones, earbuds, and software—to program inaudible frequencies into the music for the region of the frontal lobes that affects pain and reduce stress? And I think we’ve got it. I believe that we’ve got a product that over a twelve-minute period will be as effective as a valium.” He added, “It’s brilliant for catalogue—that’s the businessman in me. But it also shows the importance of music to the world. It is emotionally healing as well as physically healing.”

Had Grainge’s brush with death at the beginning of the pandemic informed his view of life, work, or the threat of A.I.? Had he answered the question “Why me?” “I’m not a particularly spiritual person,” he said. “I care about music, I care about artists, I care deeply, deeply, deeply about this industry. That was the impact the illness had.” After another pause, he added, “You know, the reality is, we’re no more than a speck of sand. All of us.”

“The last time I spoke to Lucian,” Bono told me, “he was going on about Africa: ‘It’s so exciting! All these new artists!’ He was looking at talent in Nigeria.” By 2050, more than a third of the world’s youth will live on the African continent.

When the African music scene came up in our conversation, Grainge got so worked up that he seemed like he might pogo off his chair. “A dancehall record coming out of Lagos—to an old-fart talent scout like me, this is wonderful,” he said. His ears were up. “Because they’re scenes. And then they start to cross-pollinate. It’s the greatest feeling when you’ve placed a song with an artist, or you’ve seen a band and there’s fifty people, then one hundred and fifty people, then three hundred people. It’s the greatest feeling in the world.” ♦

An earlier version of this article misidentified one of the artists involved in the Dream Track experiment.

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• Published: 27 July 2021

Cultural Divergence in popular music: the increasing diversity of music consumption on Spotify across countries

• Pablo Bello   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2343-9617 1 &
• David Garcia   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2820-9151 2 , 3 , 4  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  8 , Article number:  182 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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• Cultural and media studies

The digitization of music has changed how we consume, produce, and distribute music. In this paper, we explore the effects of digitization and streaming on the globalization of popular music. While some argue that digitization has led to more diverse cultural markets, others consider that the increasing accessibility to international music would result in a globalized market where a few artists garner all the attention. We tackle this debate by looking at how cross-country diversity in music charts has evolved over 4 years in 39 countries. We analyze two large-scale datasets from Spotify, the most popular streaming platform at the moment, and iTunes, one of the pioneers in digital music distribution. Our analysis reveals an upward trend in music consumption diversity that started in 2017 and spans across platforms. There are now significantly more songs, artists, and record labels populating the top charts than just a few years ago, making national charts more diverse from a global perspective. Furthermore, this process started at the peaks of countries’ charts, where diversity increased at a faster pace than at their bases. We characterize these changes as a process of Cultural Divergence, in which countries are increasingly distinct in terms of the music populating their music charts.

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Introduction.

Digitization is arguably the biggest change the music market has undergone over the last decades. In 2016, digital sales already accounted for more than half of the revenues of the music industry (Coelho and Mendes, 2019 ). There are innumerable aspects on which digitization has impacted how we listen, produce, and commercialize music. For example, digital music is distributed at a null marginal cost, meaning that digital audio can be reproduced ad infinitum without an extra cost on the side of the record label. For the consumer, streaming has had homologous effects. In streaming platforms, listening to new music does not carry an extra monetary cost, as a listener only pays a flat monthly fee to subscribe to a platform like Spotify Footnote 1 . This way, time and search costs are the only ones remaining in the way of music exploration. On the distribution side, online catalogs of music are orders of magnitude larger than those of physical stores due to the lack of space constraints, making a more diverse offer of music (Anderson, 2006 ). There is evidence that the increased availability of music has been accompanied by an enhanced diversity and quantity of music consumption (Datta et al., 2018 ). In this paper, we explore the evolution of global diversity in the past years and find a clear trend towards global diversity in the music market.

Concerns of Cultural Convergence have been part of the public debate for decades. European governments, in particular, have made attempts to protect national cultural industries either directly (e.g. radio quotas) or indirectly (e.g. subsidizing national film production) (Ferreira and Waldfogel, 2010 ; Waldfogel, 2018 ). Because digitization granted easier access to imported goods, predictions were that national cultural products were doomed, especially in smaller countries. Nonetheless, scientific research has not yet provided a definitive answer to whether this fear was well-grounded or not. There is evidence that digitization might have accelerated cultural convergence across countries in popular music (Gomez-Herrera et al., 2014 ; Verboord and Brandellero, 2018 ) while others find an increasing interest in national artists (Achterberg et al., 2011 ; Ferreira and Waldfogel, 2010 ). Discrepancies most likely stem from the inconsistency in the sample of countries included in these studies and the limited granularity of data available. Therefore, the question of whether digitization and streaming are currently propelling cultural convergence is open for debate. For similar cultural products, such as YouTube videos, global convergence is limited by cultural values (Park et al., 2017 ).

The recent availability of datasets on music consumption across large numbers of countries has provided a way of overcoming some limitations of previous studies. In a recent example, Way and his collaborators, look at Spotify users’ listening behavior and find that “home bias”—the preference towards national artists—is on the rise globally (Way et al., 2020 ). A source of concern is the possible influence of a platform’s endogenous processes on the behavior of its users. For instance, what appears as an enhanced preference for national artists could be the result of changes in the recommendation algorithm. Alternatively, increased popularity of playlists like the New Music Friday, which are biased towards national artists (Aguiar and Waldfogel, 2018a ) could produce a similar effect. Although far from common, major changes in the recommendation system of Spotify happen, the latest one being announced in March of 2019 (Spotify, 2019 ). As a result, recommendations are now more personalized, which, if the nationality of a user is taken into account, could generate increasing divergence between countries by feeding users with national music. According to Spotify, up to one-fifth of their streams can be attributed to algorithmic recommendations (Anderson et al., 2020 ), which may be enough to sway macro-level trends in music consumption.

We deal with platform-specific confounders by supplementing our analysis of Spotify data with a dataset from iTunes. It must be noted, however, that changes similarly affecting both platforms may exist, such as the increasing use of recommendation systems or catalog expansions, as well as the mutual influence that would make these observations non-independent. Another caveat of using platform-specific data is the fact that users of such platforms might not be representative of the entire population. Spotify users are disproportionately young and male when compared to their countries’ population (Datta et al., 2018 ). Furthermore, the composition of users of a platform is in constant change and the timing of adoption correlates with individual listening habits. For instance, in Spotify, late adopters have a stronger preference for local music than those who joined the platform early on (Way et al., 2020 ). To minimize the impact of these issues, we reduce the sample of countries from the 59 available to 39, keeping those in which Spotify is strongly established. Therefore, we expect the population of users in these countries to be more stable than in recently incorporated ones such as India, in which market penetration is quickly expanding. Additionally, this can be considered as a within-sample comparison (Salganik, 2019 ), which, given the large user base of Spotify, is of interest in and on itself.

In this paper, we tackle the question of whether digitized music consumption is globalizing or not by looking at the ecology of the national music charts of Spotify and iTunes in the past few years. In other words, by observing the global diversity in the charts we can discern whether popular music is converging or diverging across countries. More diversity across countries would be a sign of Cultural Divergence. On the other hand, a decrease in diversity would be indicative of a process of Cultural Convergence across countries. We utilize the Rao-Stirling measure of diversity and its components (Stirling, 2007 ) to describe these trends. We find upward trends in the cross-national diversity of songs, artists, and labels, starting in 2017 in Spotify as well as in iTunes and ending in 2020 for Spotify. Popular music is thus diverging across countries in what we define as Cultural Divergence. To complement previous studies, we also look at the diversity of artists and labels and find that these have increased in parallel. Ultimately, this paper describes trends in popular music across a large sample of countries, giving a more clear perspective of the cultural dynamics in the digital era.

Research background

Winner-takes-all.

Cultural markets often exhibit a highly skewed distribution of success (e.g. Keuschnigg, 2015 , Salganik et al., 2006 ). In the music market in particular, a few hits expand across the globe while the majority of popular songs only hoard local success (see Fig. 1 ). Such inequalities are partly due to the scalability of cultural products, a property that refers to the fact that most of their cost is fixed – although this property does not apply to all cultural markets, being the art field an exception – while marginal costs are relatively low. For instance, once a song is recorded or a book is written, the cost of making another copy is insignificant when compared to the initial cost of producing it, measured in time, creativity, or money, making these products scalable to large audiences. As a result, demand is highly concentrated on the best alternatives, even when they are only marginally better than the rest (Rosen, 1981 ).

Bars represent the percentage of songs that got to the charts of exactly x countries. The green line represents the total number of streams that songs on each bin have accumulated while in the charts, as a measure of popularity in the period of analysis (2017-mid 2020).

Oftentimes this is an oversimplified view, since quality in cultural products is hard to define, and it is perceived (between others) as a function of previous success, thus creating path dependencies in the popularity of cultural products and artists. This process can be viewed as one in which information is accumulated, with consumers relying on it to moderate the quality uncertainty of their selection of cultural products (Giles, 2007 ). Information is aggregated in the form of consumer reviews, sales rankings, or top charts. In a pathbreaking experimental study, Salganik et al. ( 2006 ) found that information on other listener’s musical preferences results in an amplified inequality of popularity when compared to a world of independent listeners. Using social cues in the form of aggregated information might be beneficial for individuals in cultural markets in which preference is a matter of taste, but there are multiple strategies to leverage such information and its fit varies between individuals (Analytis et al., 2018 ). In the case of artists, during their careers, “small differences in talent become magnified in larger earning differences” (Rosen, 1981 ). This “superstar effect”—defined as the previous success of an artist—is the most important predictor of the popularity of a song, even when controlling for other factors (Interiano et al., 2018 ). Thus, the huge inequalities of success stemming from the scalability of cultural products and the social influence mechanisms intervening in their spread allows for the possibility of a few songs and artists to dominate the charts across the globe.

In principle, both scalability, as well as social influence processes, may have gained bearing after digitization and streaming. On the one hand, digitization reduced the marginal costs of music production by eliminating the need to manufacture an album. Some transaction costs for digital music remain, such as copyrights and distributing platform fees, but overall, the barriers for music to flow across countries are substantially lower than in the pre-digital era. On the other hand, information is more abundant than ever before. Users can get near-real-time data on the listening decisions of millions of other users. On Spotify, anyone can search through the Top 50 playlists tailored for every country. Each of them contains the most popular songs on the platform, which are updated daily. These playlists are extremely popular among users, for instance, the Top 50 Global has over 15 million followers. This deluge of information is complemented with second-order feedback effects (Easley and Kleinberg, 2010 ) such as recommender systems, which might be luring listeners towards the most popular songs. For Spotify, there is evidence that users who rely more heavily on algorithmic recommendations listen to less diverse music and podcasts than those who discover music for themselves (Anderson et al., 2020 , Holtz et al., 2020 ). In short, there are arguments to think that the winner-takes-all effects characteristic of the music market might be gaining bearing under the digital regime, decreasing the diversity and increasing the concentration of the market in the hands of a few hit songs, superstar artists, and major labels.

The long tail

The idea of the long tail, first proposed by Anderson ( 2004 ) in a widely circulated press article sustains that online retailing has led to increased diversity in the consumption of music. This happened because online retailers do not have the limitations of shelf space that traditional brick-and-mortar stores have, and so their catalogs can be virtually unlimited in size. The unlimited digital space can be filled with niche products that do not attract huge audiences but, bit by bit, make a difference in terms of profits generated. In the book following his article, Anderson ( 2006 ) goes beyond the original argument, suggesting that the Internet has a carrying capacity for cultural products previously unattainable and its impact on cultural markets has been broader than initially expected. Not only the distribution but also the production of cultural goods has thrived as a result of the new technologies for distribution (e.g. online retailers), production (e.g. cheaper software), and consumption (e.g. flat fees). Some have even qualified these changes as a renaissance of cultural markets (Waldfogel, 2018 ).

More recently, Aguiar and Waldfogel have argued that the idea of the long tail fails to account for the unpredictability of success in cultural markets (Aguiar and Waldfogel, 2018b ; Waldfogel, 2017 , 2020 ). When confronted with new artists, for instance, record labels have a scant capacity to assess what will be the success of those artists. Under such uncertainty, producers strive to pick those with better prospects but there will inevitably be miscalculations (e.g. the infamous Decca audition of The Beatles) and artists that were deemed unworthy of being promoted will end up reaping huge success, and the same in the opposite direction. In other words, before digitization, market intermediaries held most of the decision power over which products or artists were worthy of being produced and which ones did not, the inevitable result of which was that some hits were lost. The reduced costs of production and promotion of digital cultural goods have made possible the production of these products. Unlike what the original idea of the long tail proposed, not all of them will be niche products and some will end up achieving unexpected popularity. The same goes for independent record labels, which now have better opportunities to promote their artists even with small budgets. There is evidence that indie artists and labels have gained relevance under the digital music regime (Coelho and Mendes, 2019 ). For instance, top-selling albums in the US produced by independent labels increased from 12% in 2000 to 35% in 2010 (Waldfogel, 2015 ).

Waldfogel and Aguiar refer to this phenomenon as the random long tail of music production. The random long tail contains those cultural goods that despite not being attractive to traditional intermediaries can be brought into production and, due to the inherent unpredictability of cultural markets, sometimes reach unexpected success. Accordingly, the more unpredictable a cultural market is, the greater the number of unexpected hits. For instance, the success of songs is more difficult to predict than that of movies, whose box-office earnings heavily depend on the budget and cast of the film (Aguiar and Waldfogel, 2018b ). In summary, these studies put forward a vision of the music market in the digital era as more diverse and unpredictable.

Methods and data

Although there are multiple approaches to the study of diversity in social phenomena, Stirling’s ( 2007 ) is one of the most influential and widely applied. More importantly, the Rao–Stirling diversity index has already been used to study diversity in music taste, although at a different level of analysis than here (Park et al., 2015 ; Way et al., 2019 ). The Rao–Stirling index consists of three components: variety, balance, and disparity.

Variety is a function of the number of distinct units (songs, artists, or labels) in the charts on a given day. The more unique units the more variety there is in the charts. Naturally, in the case of songs variety is bounded by the fact that the same song cannot occupy more than one chart position per country so changes in variety should be interpreted, rather than the absolute size of the indicators (which also applies to the other measures of song diversity). We measure variety as the number of distinct units divided by the total number of chart positions. Balance refers to how evenly distributed the system is across units. Here we measure balance as 1−Gini, a common measure of the inequality of a distribution. In this case, it is the distribution of chart positions across songs, artists, or labels. The more equally distributed positions are the higher the balance in the system. Importantly, balance does not give any information about the number of units in the charts (variety). For instance, label balance would be highest if two labels produce all the songs in the charts with equal shares as well as if every song in the charts was produced by a different label (and there were no songs in more than one chart-country). The disparity is defined not by categories themselves but by the qualities of such categories or elements. In other words, the disparity is a measure of how different the elements of a system are. We define the qualities of a song by its acoustic features Footnote 2 and then calculate the euclidean distance between songs. In the case of artists, we define them by the central tendency of the acoustic features of their songs on the charts. The Rao–Stirling index combines variety, balance, and disparity into a single indicator of diversity Footnote 3 .

Additionally, we introduce Zeta diversity, a measure from biology. Zeta diversity was developed by Hui and McGeoch ( 2014 ) to tackle the issues with pairwise measures of diversity. Aggregated pairwise distance measures are consistently biased (Baselga, 2013 ) and, when the number of sites (countries) is large, they approximate their upper limit (Hui and McGeoch, 2014 ). More importantly, Zeta diversity gives a more nuanced view of the interplay between global and local hits. The distribution of the number of countries in which a song reaches the charts is right-skewed, as shown in Fig. 1 , meaning that most songs enter the charts of just one or two countries. As a consequence, what aggregated measures such as Rao–Stirling mainly capture is the effect of local hits. The influence of global hits is mostly null in such measures because of their paucity. Zeta diversity, on the other hand, measures distances at multiple orders. For instance, Zeta of order 3 ( ζ 3 ) represents the expected number of songs shared by groups of three countries. It is calculated by looking at all possible combinations of three countries and calculating the number of songs that each group shares. Higher orders or Zeta (e.g. songs shared by groups of 10 or more countries) capture the prevalence of more global hits. Here, we characterize Zeta by its central tendency, but other options are possible. As the order of Zeta increases its value decreases monotonically since there are always fewer songs charting in groups of three countries than in groups of two. In short, Zeta diversity gives us a more nuanced view of the distribution of success of songs across the charts compared to other diversity measures.

The data for the study comes from Spotify’s top 200 charts and iTunes’ top 100. We illustrate the analysis focusing on Spotify’s data because of the larger sample of countries (39 vs. 19). The entire list of countries can be found in Supplementary Table S1 online. Because iTunes data could not be retrieved from an official source (instead we obtained it through Kworb.com), the results are reported only as a means of externally validating our main findings. Spotify’s data covers the period from 2017-01-01 to 2020-06-20, iTunes top 100 daily charts for the period 2013-08-14 to 2020-07-16.

Figure 2 shows distances between countries as a function of the songs shared between their charts within a year. Countries appear geographically clustered. One cluster is formed by Western countries of which Spain is the exception, being part of a different cluster, together with the Latin American countries. The third cluster encapsulates the Asian countries and Brazil. There are some noticeable anomalies, such as the closeness between Turkey and Brazil. Upon closer examination, most of the songs shared between them are produced in the United States. This is likely the result of the small market penetration of Spotify, making for a user base of early adopters more internationally oriented. Alternatively, it could be the result of a small catalog of local music. In any case, the observable consequence is an over-representation of international (and mainly US) hits in both countries’ charts.

Jaccard distances calculated over annually constructed incidence matrices. Countries are colored according to the continent they belong to (red: Americas, yellow: Europe, blue: Asia, Green: Oceania).

Although positions are fairly stable over the years, if anything, clusters of countries seem to consolidate, being these three groups more clearly discernible in 2020 than in 2017. Following Park et al. ( 2017 ) we also look at the relationship between countries as a projection of the two-mode network between countries and songs. The modularity of the network indicates the degree to which countries are clustered into modules beyond what would be expected on a random network. Modularity increased consistently from 2017 up to 2020 (see Supplementary Fig. S4 ) indicating that countries within clusters are becoming more similar in their music charts and, at the same time, drifting away from other clusters. These results are consistent with general notions of cultural, geographical, and linguistic distance which elsewhere have been proved to be the main determinants of music taste similarities between countries (Moore et al., 2014 ; Pichl et al., 2017 ; Schedl et al., 2017 ) although with a few exceptions such as the above-mentioned.

Seen as a whole, the diversity of songs, artists, and labels has increased during this period. Variety has grown not only on Spotify but on iTunes as well (Fig. 3 ). The resemblance between the two trends is startling, especially if we consider how different these platforms are, one being a streaming platform with growing popularity (Spotify) while the other (iTunes) is a digital music shop whose user base is in decay. The resemblance between the trends points to the external validity of the observations, although there could be some degree of influence between the platforms and thus they cannot be regarded as completely independent observations. The upward tendency in variety starts in 2017 and plateaus at the end of 2019 on Spotify while it keeps increasing in iTunes.

Values range from 0 (same set of songs in every country) to 1 (no overlap between the charts). Calculated for countries in both datasets (16 countries) and the same chart size (100 positions). Time series are calculated with daily frequency and smoothed over a 10-day window. Both Spotify and iTunes display consistent trends of increasing variety over time.

The increase in song diversity can be observed in Fig. 4 . Balance, disparity, and variety have all increased during the period. The disparity indicator also shows a strong seasonal burst around Christmas. This is consistent with other findings, suggesting that in countries in the Northern Hemisphere musical intensity declines around Christmas while the opposite is true for the Southern Hemisphere (Park et al., 2019 ). Overall diversity (Rao–Stirling index) rises from 2017 up to 2020 and then plateaus. Hence, not only there are more distinct songs in the charts (variety) but these are acoustically more dissimilar (disparity) and their distribution over the chart slots is more equal (balance) than at the beginning of the period.

Diversity, measured as balance, disparity, variety, or a combination of them, has been increasing consistently across countries with a plateau at the beginning of the year 2020. Besides the secular growth, disparity shows a strong seasonal component centered around Christmas.

As for songs, the diversity of artists has also grown. However, the trend is distinct at the head of the charts than at the bottom. By slicing charts at certain ranking positions we create a top 10, top 50, and top 200 for each country. When it comes to balance and variety, the increase has been more pronounced at the head of the charts, which already presented a higher level at the beginning of the observed period. However, disparity is lowest within the top 10, indicating that the group of artists with songs on the head of the charts are stylistically more similar than those who just make it to the charts (a group that subsumes the former). What we can derive from these trends is that, while there are proportionally more unique artists at the top of the charts, the music that those artists produce is relatively similar, as if there was an acoustic “recipe” for reaching the peak of the charts. In general, artist diversity as a whole has increased at a similar pace across strata of the charts (Fig. 5 c).

All the components of artist diversity have increased steadily during the period. As for songs, artist disparity bursts around Christmas. While balance and variety are higher at the peak of the charts, disparity shows the opposite pattern.

The increasing diversity of songs and artists in the charts has been accompanied by a more equally distributed market for record labels (Fig. 6 a). Again, the trend is steeper if we look only at the head of the charts. The number of distinct labels with at least one song in the charts has also increased in a stratified manner (Fig. 6 b). In general, labels had on average fewer artists and songs on the charts at the end of the period. While in the first 6 months of 2017 labels had on average 5.88 songs on the charts (and 2.19 artists), for the first half of 2020 it was one less song (and only 1.66 artists). Interestingly, the number of songs that each artist got on the charts has increased slightly, going from 2.67 in 2017 to 2.96 in 2020 (comparing the first half of each year).

The left panel shows the balance of labels over time for three sizes of the top chart, displaying increases over time especially for the highest positions in the chart. The right panel shows the variety of labels on the charts. The same patterns as for balance can be observed.

We can take a closer look at the interplay between local and global hits through the Zeta diversity measure. Figure 7 presents the results for monthly Zeta diversity measures of orders 2—which is equivalent to pairwise distances—up to 20—the mean number of common songs shared by groups of 20 countries. We observe that across all orders of Zeta the mean diversity tends to decrease with time (brighter colors) which is consistent with the previous results Footnote 4 . When we look at the decay of Z -values along orders of Zeta ( x -axis) we observe that it gets steeper over time. In other words, the slope of the regression with Z -values ( y -axis) as a dependent variable and Z -order ( x -axis) as a predictor gets greater with time. Table 1 presents the results of a linear regression model that shows the increase in steepness over time. The substantive interpretation is that global hits have taken the lion’s share of the increase in diversity, becoming an increasingly rare phenomenon.

The x -axis represents the order of Zeta and the y -axis the z -value, or mean percentage of songs shared across groups of x countries. Both axes are represented on a log10 scale. The function of Zeta with order shifts down over time and becomes steeper.

By analyzing 4 years of data of music charts in 39 countries, we find clear evidence of increased diversity in the music charts across countries. In the short period covered by this study, the number of unique songs, artists, and labels on the charts in our sample of countries has grown considerably. Despite the concerns expressed by several governments, particularly in Europe (Waldfogel, 2018 , p. 220), popular music is not increasingly globalized. Instead, countries’ popular music was amidst a process of Cultural Divergence that seemed to have come to a halt at the end of the observed period. The increase in diversity seems to be driven by a segmentation of the music market rather than an evenly heightened idiosyncrasy of music consumption. In other words, countries that were already close to one another in taste are becoming more similar but increasingly different from other clusters of countries. Such clusters appear strongly determined, but not only, by geographical and cultural distance. Research shows that regional clusters also differ in the acoustic properties of the music that their populations listen to (Park et al., 2019 ). Therefore, although diversity is usually taken as a positive trait of a system, the segmentation which is driving the increase in diversity can be a source of concern.

We also show that diversity has been on the rise in terms of artists and record labels. Particularly, the rise of label diversity rules out the possibility that the big labels are producing pop music fitted to different markets, as the proponents of glocalization would argue. As a consequence of these trends, not only songs might be increasingly distinct across countries, but also their production and distribution.

Whether it is the preferences of users or shifts in the production and distribution of music that are driving these changes is not clear. The possibility that Cultural Divergence is the result of a random long tail in music production is more consistent with the pace and ubiquity of these changes than preference-based accounts of the same phenomenon. Therefore, as an alternative to preference-based explanations of the increase in home bias (Way et al., 2020 ) and global diversity, we propose that these observations could be explained by changes in music production. One first source of concern with the preference-based explanation stems from the speed and ubiquity of the observed changes. Cultural shifts of this scale are generally slow, comparable in speed to the evolution of traits in animal populations (Lambert et al., 2020 ). Also, there is evidence that changes in the aggregated preferences of a population are mostly driven by generational replacement (Vaisey and Lizardo, 2016 ). Instead, we argue that field configurations can more rapidly sway macro-patterns by conditioning the opportunities of individuals. In the case of music, the random long tail of music production may have increased the available options of users to express their idiosyncratic preferences, which, being to some extent geographically determined (Ferreira and Waldfogel, 2010 ; Gomez-Herrera et al., 2014 ; Way et al., 2020 ), would likely result in national music charts drifting away from each other.

Methodologically, this research shows the potential of Zeta diversity, a measure devised for the study of biodiversity, to gauge the globalization of cultural products at different levels. Since truly global hits are extremely rare phenomena when compared to songs that reach in small groups of culturally similar countries, they carry very low weight when calculating pairwise distances, which is a common way of looking at cross-national diversity. National charts could drift apart without affecting the likelihood of the eventual hit to spread globally and conventional pairwise measures would not pick this dynamic. As we show, this has not been the case for the music market, in which the positive trend in diversity has been accompanied by a significant decrease in the spread of global hits. The application of Zeta diversity is not without issues, one of them being that its calculation is computationally demanding when compared with the other measures of diversity presented here, because of its combinatorial nature. In return, it offers relatively stable estimates of rare events, a useful feature when studying heavy-tailed distributions in general, and cultural markets in particular, in which global hits are highly unlikely but more consequential in terms of collective attention than the more common local hits. More broadly, our analysis applies mathematical methods from ecology to analyze the consumption of cultural content. This interface between disciplines has other applications, for example, to understand the dynamical reorganization of user activity on social media (Palazzi et al., 2020 ). Furthermore, our work builds on existing literature utilizing methods from ecology to study musical taste and consumption (Park et al., 2015 ; Way et al., 2019 ).

To conclude, our results run counter to the notion of an unbounded market that can be distilled from the idea of globalization. It also challenges the expectations of the winner-takes-all set of theories that predict heightened inequality in the distribution of success under decreased restrictions to global expansion. Instead, the music market has become, in this short period, more hostile to the spread of hits across the globe. From a positive perspective, this means that “national cultures” are not disappearing, although this might come at the expense of a more segmented market in bundles of culturally similar countries, and the risks associated with such segmentation if spread, for instance, from esthetic to normative judgments.

Data availability

Data and code for the analyses are available at https://github.com/PabloBelloDelpon/Spotify_paper .

Users also have the option to get free access to a limited version of the platform, which is ad-supported.

Spotify measures the acoustic features of each song and groups them into the followingcategories, all of which we include in the analysis: danceability, energy, key, loudness, mode,speechiness, acousticness, instrumentalness, liveness, valence, tempo, and duration.

More precisely, Rao–Stirling is calculated as in Stirling ( 2007 ): D  = ∑ it ( i ≠ j ) d ij   ⋅   p i   ⋅   p j , where p i and p j are the proportions of elements i and j in the system and did is the euclidean distance between their respective acoustic representations.

Zeta diversity is measured in the opposite direction than the previous indicators of diversity. Higher values indicate more overlap of songs across charts and smaller values indicate less overlap.

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Acknowledgements

D.G. acknowledges funding from the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) through project VRG16-005. We thank Marc Keuschnigg and Paul Schuler for their insightful comments on previous versions of this article.

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Bello, P., Garcia, D. Cultural Divergence in popular music: the increasing diversity of music consumption on Spotify across countries. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 8 , 182 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00855-1

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Music is the background of life, representing an international language that connects different cultures. It is also significant with respect to economies, markets, and businesses. The literature in the music field has identified several issues related to the role of digitalization in the revolution of music, the distribution of music products, the management and organization of music events, music marketing strategies, and the position of musicians as entrepreneurs. This paper comprises a systematic literature review of the most recent articles discussing the numerous connections between music, business, and management (2017–2022). Through a rigorous protocol, this research discusses the effects of the digital revolution on the music industry, with particular reference to the persisting oligopoly of major labels and the new business models that integrate music streaming and social networks. The findings show the renaissance and relevance of live music events, the fundamental role of segmentation strategies for managing festivals, and the limited presence of sustainability as a priority during festivals and events management. Furthermore, the literature highlights the relevance of discussions concerning musicians’ identity, especially in light of the complex relationship between the bohemian and the entrepreneurial nature of their profession. This is followed by numerous reflections on future research opportunities, recommending theoretical and empirical in-depth studies of music industry competition, futuristic management philosophies and business models, and the roles of technology, sustainability, and financial elements in fostering artists’ success in the digital era. Finally, the paper discusses business models and strategies for musicians, festivals management, stores, and sustainability.

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1 Introduction

As Mithen ( 2009 ; p 3) states, “To be human is to be musical”. Music is part of most individuals’ daily lives. For example, it plays in the background when people make purchases at stores and eat at restaurants. It is a universal language that helps strangers communicate immediately, that spreads and evokes emotions, and that inspires players, producers, and listeners (Cooke 1990 ; Hunter and Schellenberg 2010 ). However, beyond being an artform that can connect people from different cultures (Huron 2001 ) and with different identities (Mithen 2009 ), music is also a business.

The worldwide relevance of music can be recognized not only in philosophical discussions but also in statistical data about the industry. Music consumption has grown quickly, particularly since the start of the digital revolution, and this growth seems unlikely to slow down in the future (IFPI 2022 ). The worldwide music industry has grown significantly in recent years. In fact, it grew from US$14.2 billion in 2014 to US$25.9 billion in 2021, revealing growth of 18.5% in 2021 (IFPI 2022 ). Streaming now drives the music market, representing 65% of global music market revenues in 2021 (IFPI 2022 ). This trend is a consequence of the digital revolution, which has been characterized by two phases of development (Koh et al. 2019 ). The first phase involved physical and digital music record sales. The second phase was the development of streaming, unbundling, and cross-platform services that combined music with other entertainment forms, such as video games, television programs, films, and talent shows (Shen et al. 2019 ).

Two of the most relevant dimensions of the music industry are as follows: (a) the production and distribution of music through physical and digital support networks, as guided by record companies; and (b) the production and distribution of live music, which is controlled by world-famous artists but is characterized by many minor professional musicians, sound technicians, and other workers. These two dimensions are interconnected. The digital revolution is disruptive, and it has upset traditional capitalist economies, but the world of live music has resisted such changes (Azzellini et al. 2021 ). In addition to these two major dimensions, the music industry includes a complex and elaborate set of other dimensions. These comprise the conditions of minor musicians and labels; publishing, managing, and marketing; teaching and other educational activities (Thomson 2013 ); and the conditions of local music and record stores.

In this regard, multiple issues have emerged from the literature, mostly related to the big change that the digital revolution has brought about in the music industry. For example, minor artists and labels have to consider new marketing strategies, and they need to find innovative ways to exploit the easier connections between consumers and their products that technologies allow, despite having limited financial assets (Zhang 2018 ). Another example involves music events or festivals, which face complex challenges because of the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Innovation in the organization and marketing of these events is focused on the concept of value creation, guided by the idea of festivals as chaotic and unpredictable events in which collaboration and co-creation are critical for the achievement of financial, economic, and social objectives (Werner et al. 2019 ). Covid-19 and the digital revolution complicated the conditions of local music and record stores, which are more centered on experience than competition and need stable innovation in their marketing strategies (Trabucchi et al. 2017 ).

Moreover, the growth of the music business has highlighted the complex relationship between musicians’ artistic and entrepreneurial sides. In fact, musicians face cultural barriers to their identification as professionals. As Frederickson and Rooney ( 1990 ) noted, an absence of formal requisites to enter the musical profession is one of its most relevant barriers; because of this lack of a need for credentials, many people do not consider music to be a profession. Indeed, as Henry ( 2013 ) found, few music students think about teaching music as a future profession. According to Pizzolitto ( 2021 ), musicians are reluctant to consider themselves entrepreneurs because of the complex relationship between art and profit. Therefore, the entrepreneurial identity of musicians should be fostered to overcome this obstacle to recognizing music as a profession.

This may be challenging, as the Covid-19 pandemic has adversely affected musicians’ activities. Although the music industry has continued to grow and has not been experienced many negative consequences, there have been numerous (orderly) protests by musicians and sound technicians who feel they have been forgotten by governmental policies. For example, in October 2020, a large group of musicians played in front of the British Parliament to protest a decision to decrease state benefits for freelance workers (Savage 2020 ). During the same month, musicians and sound technicians peacefully occupied many public squares in Italy to broadcast the slogan Esistiamo anche noi , which translates to “We also exist” (Sky Tg24 2020 ). In November 2020, musicians in Berlin held silent protests against a lockdown (Global Times 2020 ). Indeed, music around the world has experienced a number of conflicts.

Beyond the disparities in the success of record companies versus professional musicians, there are philosophical complexities connected to an antinomy between the artistic nature of music and the capitalistic context in which it is developed (e.g., see Bridson et al. 2017 ; Haynes and Marshall 2017 ). Musicians and record producers also face strategic issues concerning the distribution of their music. Waldfogel ( 2017 ) defined the current era as a golden age for music listening, yet musicians and producers experience dilemmas every time they intend to launch a product. One dilemma relates to the many opportunities available because of the digital revolution; for example, one can take advantage of digital platforms, streaming, and physical support networks. However, the increase in options demands more in-depth strategic planning. Thus, the philosophical significance of music to individuals, its relevance to people’s lives, and its importance to the economy are at odds with the research conditions of the field.

While attempts to map the literature on music research have been numerous and of high quality, they have mainly concentrated on the effects of music in the workplace (e.g., Landay and Harms 2019 ) or music education research. For instance, in 2004, volume 32 (issue 3) of Psychology of Music focused on mapping music education research in single national contexts (e.g., Welch et al. 2004 ; Gruhn 2004 ). Moreover, in 2006, Roulston published a methodological paper that incentivized qualitative research in the music field. Therefore, while existing research has discussed content relevant to the field, there is no literature review on the recent development of music in business and management studies, including topics such as digitalization, the conditions of the industry and competition, the management of music events, innovations, sustainability, and the complex position of musicians after the digital revolution. Consequently, this article addresses the research question “How does recent literature debate music in business and management studies?”.

The next section provides details on the methodology used in this literature review. In particular, it gives a detailed explanation of the procedure used to gather data and analyze the content of articles. Following this is a descriptive analysis of the literature sample, including the journals, author affiliations, and methods of the articles, and an analysis of the contents of the articles. The next section studies the themes that emerged in the articles. Finally, future research opportunities, managerial implications, and a general discussion of the results are presented in the conclusion.

2 Methodology

A systematic literature review (SLR) was chosen as the methodology for this study for two main reasons. First, the research questions concern a specific field (i.e., music in business studies). Second, an SLR can ensure a greater degree of objectivity compared with other kinds of literature reviews (e.g., narrative). It can also ensure reproducibility and limit biases in article selection and interpretation (Denyer and Tranfield 2009 ; Post et al. 2020 ). This study used a method described by Wolfswinkel et al. ( 2013 ), where contents of articles are analyzed using a grounded theory approach. This method ensured that the analysis would not be based on any prejudices. Moreover, grounded theory provides the advantage of developing a theoretical framework in the absence of a specific background (Corbin and Strauss 1990 ; Strauss and Corbin 1997 ). Finally, the method published by Wolfswinkel et al. ( 2013 ) exhibited no article selection differences compared with other SLR methodologies (e.g., see Denyer and Tranfield 2009 ; Post et al. 2020 ). Therefore, the method met all the requirements for conducting an SLR as objectively as possible.

2.1 The employed protocol

The method included the five following phases: define, search, select, analyze, and present (Fig.  1 ). During the first phase, the database and the inclusion/exclusion criteria for the study were determined. Similar to most SLRs (e.g., see Vrontis and Christofi 2019 ), only articles that were written in English and that had been published in peer-reviewed journals were included in the sample. To ensure that articles of the highest quality would be included, only those listed in the SCOPUS, EBSCOHost, and Web of Science databases were considered. Finally, specific keywords were used to search the three databases and were applied to titles, abstracts, and keywords of the articles. The keywords were music AND ( business OR management ).

Phases of SLR employed protocol

The second phase consisted of the search for articles. This began with several exploratory analyses to ensure that all relevant literature would be included. The research commenced with searching SCOPUS, and 7825 results were retrieved. The results were limited to peer-reviewed articles written in English, which narrowed the list to 3764 results. As the focus was on recent literature regarding music in business studies, the publication years were then restricted to 2017–2022, leaving 1333 results.

The same steps were followed in searching EBSCOHost. The initial dataset included 17,765 results, and after the limitations were applied, 183 articles remained. The steps were repeated in searching Web of Science, resulting in an initial sample of 2944 results. This number decreased to 855 after the limitations were applied.

During the third phase, the 2371 results were refined, and 771 duplicates were eliminated. After screening the titles, abstracts, keywords, and contents, 1444 false positives were eliminated. The final dataset comprised 145 articles.

The last two steps of the procedure were “analyze” and “present.” The next section presents the descriptive and content analyses of the articles (i.e., the results of these steps). Analyzing the articles included determining the type of paper, the distribution of publications over time, the authors’ productivity and affiliations, and the methods employed in the empirical articles. The contents of the articles were analyzed using a grounded theory approach, during which four themes emerged.

2.2 Inclusion and exclusion criteria

This section details the methods applied when including or excluding articles. To facilitate the selection of articles, an Excel file with 19 columns and 145 rows was created. More than 2700 cells were filled in with the following information for each paper: ID number, DOI, authors, title, publication year, source title, number of citations, source (i.e., SCOPUS, EBSCOHost, or Web of Science), paper type (i.e., empirical, conceptual, review), methodology (i.e., qualitative or quantitative), methods employed, sample size, type of statistical units; authors’ provenience; and theories cited. For reasons of space, the table cannot be shown here, but it is available upon request.

In addition, a column was devoted to the reason for including or excluding a paper. The objective was to consider only articles that explicitly referred to the interconnections between music and business or management issues. The process started with evaluating the titles, abstracts, and keywords to gain an understanding of the articles’ contents. If this evaluation was insufficient, the articles were read for a better evaluation.

To ensure transparency in the selection process, as suggested by Denyer and Tranfield ( 2009 ), some examples are considered. One article that was retrieved from the Scopus database was the article Neumatic singing in Thai popular singing, 1925–1967 by Inkhong et al. ( 2020 ) because it included the keywords used for the initial extraction. The article discussed solutions to problems related to incorrect pronunciation using neumatic singing. Therefore, it was excluded. Another article, Quality management of music education in modern kindergarten: Educational expectations of families by Boyakova ( 2018 ) talked about understanding and improving the quality of children’s music education and made no reference to business or management studies. Therefore, it too was excluded.

Examples of articles that were included are as follows. The article Digital music and the “death of the long tail” by Coelho and Mendes ( 2019 ) discussed the impact of digital distribution in the music market, concentrating on the dualism between the long tail theory and the superstar effect theory. Schediwy et al. ( 2018 )’s article Do bohemian and entrepreneurial career identities compete or cohere? discussed the identity of musicians. The article The role of stakeholders in shifting environmental practices of music festivals in British Columbia, Canada by Hazel and Mason ( 2020 ) discussed festival management. These three articles were relevant to our study and were therefore included in our review.

2.3 Grounded analysis of the articles’ contents

The grounded theory approach employed in this review followed a certain protocol. The 145 papers included in the sample were divided into subsamples of five randomly selected papers using Excel. Open coding was used to label the subsamples with codes to identify concepts and enable comparisons of the articles, including information such as the affiliated intuitions, the methodologies used, and the theoretical in-depth analyses. The final aim is to conceptualize the most relevant aspects and identify categories and subcategories of common elements.

Axial coding was then employed to make connections between the codes and facilitate further comparison of data emerging from the articles and theoretical and methodological frameworks in the various subsamples. The final aim was to build a systematically integrated network of concepts.

Finally, selective coding was employed to conceptualize and improve the results of the previous analyses. The aim was to achieve a well-integrated theoretical reasoning that can be used to simplify and enrich the reflections on the studied phenomenon.

Figure  2 shows an example of how subthemes emerged during the analysis. The blue tables correspond to random samples of five articles. The red oblongs represent the most relevant articles. The black squares represent (a very limited number of) critical codes (open coding). The violet, red, and green circles represent the results of conceptual connections among the codes (axial coding); the interpretation of these connections is shown at the bottom of the figure.

An example of grounded methodology applied in this research (colour figure online)

2.4 Limitations

This literature review tries to develop a complete picture of the most relevant research in music management and business. The aim is to establish a starting point for future in-depth analysis and gathering of future research in this area. Nevertheless, it is not exempt from limitations. First, the methodology, database searches, and analyses were performed by one author. Although the selected method (grounded theory method; see Wolfswinkel et al. 2013 ) was chosen for its ability to reduce objectivity, even in the content analysis of the selected articles, there might be limitations in the application of inclusion and exclusion criteria considering the high number of articles.

Second, this review employed specific databases to ensure the quality of papers extracted. However, this method inevitably excluded books, book chapters, grey literature, and other sources of information that could be relevant to the topic and in terms of triangulating information and enriching the results of the analysis. Therefore, future research should include the object of the analysis and more sources of information.

Finally, this review limits the time span to recent years. Although SLRs should include a limited number of articles to concentrate on a very specific and relevant research question, the considerable body of knowledge in terms of music management and business suggests that a more comprehensive viewpoint can be considered. Nevertheless, in case future research would be interested in enlarging the time span of the analysis, the amount of articles that would emerge would be studied using quantitative methods, such as meta-analysis or bibliometric analysis.

3 Descriptive analysis

This section presents the descriptive analysis of the selected literature. The analysis focuses on three aspects: (1) the authors’ provenience (Fig.  3 ), (2) the types of papers, and (3) the methods employed in the empirical studies.

Authors’ provenience

The UK and the USA led in terms of the number of relevant articles published in the period under study with 28.96% of the articles. There is a worldwide interest among scientists in terms of music research in business studies. Even though empirical articles are the most common in the selected dataset, theoretical articles and literature reviews are present in each of the five years considered. Excluding the year 2022, in which theoretical articles represent less than 8% of the contributions, one fifth of the dataset from 2017 to 2021 consists of theoretical articles and literature reviews. Therefore, there is considerable interest in debating conceptual issues in this field. Qualitative research—particularly case studies (26.42% of the dataset)—is the most common methodology used for performing research in the field. Interviews were also commonly used in the extracted contributions (18.87%). Therefore, it is possible that qualitative frameworks of analysis are the best way to gather and evaluate data in this market (Figs.  4 and 5 ).

Papers’ typology per year

Methods employed in the selected articles

4 Content analysis

This section presents the results obtained from the grounded analysis of the selected papers. Given the amount of data and the complexity of the concepts, two graphic representations have been created. Figure  6 shows a summary of codes, sub-themes, and themes that emerged from the analysis. Figure  7 shows a conceptual map of the field.

Codes, themes and subthemes emerged from selected literature

Conceptual map

4.1 The digital revolution and the music industry: Have things actually changed?

4.1.1 the effects of the digital revolution on the music industry.

The digital revolution profoundly and directly impacted the economy through direct effects such as an increase in aggregate productivity and competitiveness and through more unobserved effects relating to the development of open-access platforms, new business models, and the need of managers to always achieve a better understanding of consumers’ expectations. These unobserved effects of the digital revolution have been described as digital dark matter (Vendrell-Herrero et al. 2017 ). Moreover, the inevitability of technology-related industry disruption seems not to be totally caught by professionals and firms, which are not reacting appropriately to this phenomenon (Riemer and Johnston 2019 ). For this reason, new business models are theorized in the literature. For example, Morrow ( 2018 ) introduced the concept of distributed agility as a model consisting of a reactive approach through which multiple self-organized teams combine their abilities to respond quickly to the rapid changes in the new digital market.

During the period 2011–2018, digital music and streaming contributed dramatically to the renaissance of the market (Nakano 2019 ). According to Nag ( 2017 ), the dramatic increase in the amount of accessible music contents and the decreasing barriers to consumer access is producing a contradictory effect on the philosophy of consumption. On one side is the benefit of freedom of choice and on the other side is an indirect call for more scarcity.

The literature has recognized three waves of disruptive innovations—digital music distribution, permanent digital downloads, and music streaming (Urbinati et al. 2019 ). Reactions to these things were similar; after an initial majors’ tendency to protect their own competitive position against opponents, there was adaptation to the new paradigms of music distribution. In particular, after the digital music distribution revolution, incumbents concentrated on building online shops and selling music from their catalogues. After the digital download revolution, incumbents verified the weaknesses in their previous strategic reactions and started to build relationships and partnerships with newcomers to fight the increased competition of important innovations such as Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Finally, with the music streaming revolution, entities such as the iTunes Music Store started to consider acquisitions as strategic choices to limit the damage caused by the rapid development of services like Spotify (Urbinati et al. 2019 ).

The music supply network evolved in a similar way. Nakano and Fleury ( 2017 ) identified three stages in this evolution. The first stage in the 1980s was a physical supply chain in which the hierarchical model with a vertical integration structure fostered the power of major labels that controlled technical and market access. The second stage in the 1990s was a transitional supply network in which the captive governance model fostered an open hierarchy. In this phase, the power was in the form of control over market access. Finally, in the last 20 years, the supply network evolved to a digital ecosystem in which individual producers and small and large providers can (at least theoretically) compete with major labels, which are exploiting their accumulated power to control mass market access through collaboration, partnerships, and new business models based on digital outlets and aggregators.

Sinclair and Tinson ( 2017 ) highlighted the problem of the decreasing value of psychological ownership of music guided by the dematerialization of music and the advent of access-based streaming platforms. Nevertheless, the antecedents of psychological ownership—investment of the self, profound knowledge and control of the target, and pride—demonstrated that consumers are modifying their experimentation with psychological ownership, achieving loyalty, empowerment, citizenship, and social rewards as consequences of this phenomenon. Therefore, through the new conceptualization of the psychological ownership of music, consumers are able to control the target of ownership and to develop and protect their music identity.

The other side of the coin of the digital revolution in music is that collaboration between major labels and other actors has allowed them to keep their power and to maintain the oligopoly in the market. In this context, while technological and digital innovation is stimulated, innovation in music is discouraged (Sun 2019 ).

The music industry has reacted to this tendency and has been able to assimilate the technological and digital innovations (Naveed et al. 2017 ). In particular, there are types of innovations that have assumed an increasing level of importance after the digital revolution. For example, co-innovation, a construct comprising co-discovery, co-creation, and co-capture, is widely recognized as a fundamental element in promoting correct governance, leadership, and resource integration (Saragih et al. 2019a , b ).

4.1.2 The persisting oligopoly in the music market

The digital revolution and the digitalization of music produced an unexpected result in the music industry. Visionaries believed that the ability to achieve unlimited access to every kind of music—referred to as the celestial jukebox—would have led the music industry to overcome the oligopolist control of major labels and stimulate cultural diversity (Sun 2019 ). Nevertheless, the huge number of opportunities provided by the new digital market demonstrated that consumers need to be guided in their choices. The opportunities for musicians’ self-release apparently increased the degree of democratization of the music market. In fact, they consolidated the commodification and centralization of music whereby major labels still dominate the industry by promoting the conservative management of copyright ownership. This condition isolated self-released musicians, who have a marginal position in the industry. This is a worldwide condition, as verified in several articles, such as that by Qu et al. ( 2021 ). There is broad consensus regarding this condition and very few dissenters (e.g., Arbatani et al. 2018 ).

The digital revolution changed the pop-rock market, and streaming is now dominating the music industry, although there is still an important physical sector. Major labels have recently started a growth path after 15 years of crisis via the development of dynamic capabilities. In particular, technology allowed the emergence of non-hits and niches, increasing their opportunity to gain a long tail effect. Nevertheless, there is evidence of the persistence of the “superstar effect” (Coelho and Mendes 2019 ).

According to Prey et al. ( 2020 ), Spotify shows a bias towards major label content. Musicians’ success is dependent on services like Spotify. Therefore, Spotify’s preferences for major labels has caused discontent among minor labels and minor musicians.

Currently, the logic with which incumbents develop their strategy is correlated to the need for more timely approaches (Guichardaz et al. 2019 ). It is necessary to accept the competition of new technological innovations (e.g., iTunes and Spotify) and to develop suitable strategies to exploit the dynamic changes in the market (Trabucchi et al. 2017 ).

This evidence is confirmed in several studies. For example, Dellyana et al. ( 2017 ) state that the composition of actors in the music market has been changing over time. Conditions have become more dynamic, which stimulates the opportunity to increase the number of partnerships. Increasing the number of actors will change the general business model, allowing more opportunities for collaboration, including 360-degree, tailor-made partnerships; vertical integration; subscription services; pay per download; ad funded; bundles; and sponsorships. As a consequence, the many opportunities to exploit different sources of income leads actors in the industry market to develop new abilities and qualities. This modularity complicates the management of strategies and encourages the implementation of inter-firm alliances (Guichardaz et al. 2019 ). Through these collaborations, major labels are still dominating the music industry, even if independent labels and musicians can produce and distribute their music more easily and less expensively than before (Dellyana et al. 2017 ; Sun 2019 ). Major players like Spotify, Pandora, and Apple directly negotiate with the platforms to distribute artists’ music, while small labels must depend on intermediaries.

Some collaborations are, in fact, not official but extremely favorable. For example, the viral activity of fans on social media, such as YouTube, is a critical part of music stars’ strategy. Gamble et al. ( 2018 ) found that fans have an active role in the relationship between social media and the music industry. In particular, senior managers and music industry experts involved in the research argued that consumer-driven marketing campaigns can provide the best ideas regarding the execution, marketing, and managing of strategies. At the beginning of their careers, artists gain considerable advantages from social media and crowdfunding, even if fame comes as a result of their collaboration with major labels. Therefore, at the initial stage of their music success, the innovative nature of artists can be supported by fans’ activities, while at the advanced stage of their careers, artists tend to homogenize due to their involvement in the business logic of major labels business logics.

Nevertheless, evidence in the literature shows that collaborations and new business models are not the only way through which major labels react to the technological and digital changes in the market. Trabucchi et al. ( 2017 ) have shown that labels are able to re-invent old music solutions, such as CDs and vinyl, through innovations in their organizational structure and dynamic capabilities (e.g., changing their objective to entertainment enterprises), changing the meaning of their products from instruments for listening to music to collectors’ objects, and transforming the purchase process into an in-store experience. Therefore, developing dynamic capabilities seems to be the main response of major labels to the technological revolution in the music market. Changing the value proposition, capturing the new value of products, and customer orientation allow the major players to exploit the intersection between meaning and technology, thus modifying the competition among the incumbents.

4.1.3 Social networks and streaming services

Social networks have critical effects on artists’ success on online social network platforms. Communication with fun experimented a tremendous change after the digital revolution and the advent of social media. In the past, musicians used the press, television, and radio to attract fans’ interest. With social media and social networks, however, communication between artists and fans is direct. Communication with fans together with strategies that include the active sending of friend requests to fans or commenting on their posts can allow artists to control and influence their network (Ansari et al. 2018 ). Moreover, outside affiliations of artists can have a positive impact on the degree and density of networks (Ansari et al. 2018 ).

Social networks can have a dramatic effect on the consumption of music. For example, Spotify bundles music content in the form of playlists. This behavior allows Spotify to take over the market demand, reducing its dependency on major labels (Prey et al. 2020 ). Choi and Burnes ( 2017 ) studied the impact of using social media in the music industry and confirmed that social media have a considerable impact on fans’ engagement. Therefore, building solid and durable relationships and vitalizing participation should be considered a strategic focus for these firms. In the modern music market, firms cannot control value creation; therefore, they should use social media to enhance co-creation with fans, thus vitalizing their community and becoming the driving force in changing markets.

Business models in music benefit considerably from reward-based crowdfunding (Gamble et al. 2017 ), even though there is evidence suggesting that problems can arise due to young fans’ apprehension. Nevertheless, opportunities allowed by crowdfunding can help overcome limitations due to the need for constant consumer confidence. In fact, the development of partnerships with crowdfunding platforms has been increasing the opportunity for major labels to challenge the user-centric tendency of digital innovations (Gamble et al. 2017 ).

According to Arditi ( 2017 ), streaming services represent the most relevant revenue in the music industry since 2015. Streaming services are one of the most important reasons why the music industry recovered from the disaster of Napster and similar platforms for free music sharing. Indeed, streaming services are considered the (partial) solution to the decrease in music CD sales and to the increase in piracy. Moreover, there are similarities and differences between cultures about the future of streaming services. For example, Kim et al. ( 2017 ) show that US and Korean consumers prefer subscription-based on-demand streaming services and pay a higher price compared to the value of current streaming services. Nakano ( 2019 ) analyzed major US and UK outlets, recognizing that the preference of customers is for streaming services; however, there is still space for niches for which downloading is still preferred. Moreover, the existence of two major ecosystems, Android and iOS, has impeded the emergence of a dominant player to date.

Behavioral intentions connected to streaming service utilization depend on specific factors such as performance expectancy (i.e., the benefits for customers obtained by using streaming services), the degree of user-friendliness, social influence, the accessibility of resources and support, hedonic motivation, habit, and price (Barata and Coelho 2021 ). Suppliers of music services, such as streaming, should consider in-depth pricing strategies. Li et al. ( 2020 ) found that pricing strategies include advertising intensity, subscription fees, and song prices. Moreover, they considered subscription and ownership models and found that the first dominates the second only if advertisement revenues are limited. Therefore, an eventual mixed model turns to a subscription model when there are advertisement revenues, while it turns to an ownership model when revenues are higher.

The problem is to understand if the broad use of streaming services is a good thing for musicians as well. Musicians are losing control of the revenues that come from their music (Towse 2020 ). In fact, the opportunity to pursue a career based only on record sales is restricted to superstars. For example, in Norway, revenues originating from music copyrights represent only a small proportion of musicians’ earnings (about 20%). Therefore, the solution should be designed around live performance revenues. Nevertheless, the sustainability of streaming services in the long run is still debated in the literature and in professional practice.

4.1.4 Effects of background music

In-store background music produces positive and negative effects. The contradiction of scientific literature is illusory. In fact, such effects depend on the design of background music, which should adapt to the context and the service, which in turn is a critical moderator of the relationship between music and purchase intentions and customers’ in-store experience. For example, loud music has positive effects in retail settings but reduces customers’ experience in a bar. Classical, familiar, and highly recognizable music generally leads to positive effects. Nevertheless, in contexts in which they are inappropriate, the literature shows adverse consequences in terms of purchase intentions (Michel et al 2017 ).

Background music and creative support systems and their effects on consumers’ purchase intentions are fundamental to music literature (Michel et al. 2017 ). A great number of empirical studies have been undertaken to obtain improved understanding of such effects in every field. Music has positive and negative influences on consumers’ emotions within the environment in which they complete their purchases. Moreover, it is able to extend consumers’ in-store visits, promoting a name, brand, and experience that customers experiment with during their purchase process (e.g., Sassenberg et al. 2022 ). This is not limited to products but includes issues related to perceived images and positive or negative reactions to what consumers see. Klein et al. ( 2021 ) highlighted the existence of an inverse U-shaped relationship between the complexity of images and the level of appreciation that music is able to modify, promoting a better reaction to simple images. In other words, music can move consumers’ attention from complex to simple stimuli. For this reason, music can be used with simple images to stimulate and improve consumers’ purchasing experience.

Background music can be seen as a functional instrument for social control because it can change people’s behaviors and workers’ productivity, although its collateral effects are still unpredictable (Karakayali and Alpertan 2020 ). Indeed, music is a mediator of emotions and attitudes; it can modify performance and generate a significant effect in the workplace, although further in-depth analyses are needed to clarify its effects (Landay and Harms 2019 ). An important review by Landay and Harms ( 2019 ) highlighted that the relationship between the music heard and mood and negative and positive emotions is moderated by extraversion (i.e., the tendency to concentrate on gratification from outside individuals), task complexity, and listening autonomy. Moreover, they found that the link between listening to music and task performance is highly contextual and depends on “the availability of cognitive resources and the type of task” (Landay and Harms 2019 , p 379). The evidence shows that workers with more experience in selecting music for personal listening can show greater improvement in their task performance.

4.2 Live music events and performance: a renovated and segmentate phenomenon

4.2.1 the renovated interest of consumers in live performance.

The co-evolution of streaming and live music has had positive consequences for the music industry (Naveed et al. 2017 ). It allowed the recovery of the music industry and the more active participation of all stakeholders. Moreover, consumers have a more active position in the music market, demonstrating more propensity to acquire digital property, for co-creation, and for participative creativity (Naveed et al. 2017 ). In particular, consumers contribute to the creation of value even during the phases of product development and commercialization (Saragih 2019 ). In the new digitalized era in which musicians’ control of their records sales is weaker, live performance is assuming increasing importance.

In general, the analyzed literature seems to agree on consumers’ renovated interest in live performance. For example, Papies and Van Heerde ( 2017 ) confirm the positive relationship between artists’ success in records sales and their success in live performance. Nevertheless, the authors verified that the opposite relationship is weaker, as it is moderated by piracy and unbundling, even if piracy seems to be a decreasing trend in some important markets (e.g., Germany). Moreover, they found a weak correlation between quality of music and artists’ fame. Nevertheless, the evidence shows that this condition of renaissance is not common to all music genres. Pompe et al. ( 2017 ) found that classical music is experiencing a crisis, mainly because consumers say they do not have enough time to enjoy classical concerts. Therefore, the problem of how to add value to some niches is still being debated in the literature.

During the period analyzed in this literature review, Covid-19 impacted the world. In this context, quarantines obliged musicians to be part of lockdowns. Concerts and live music events were cancelled, and musicians had to face a new and challenging reality. However, some positive consequences emerged. In fact, the research showed how during the pandemic musicians started to efficiently exploit online platforms to share their music and to organize 100% online music events (e.g., Areiza-Padilla and Galindo-Becerra 2022 ). Therefore, in the future, digital platforms should be used simultaneously with physical places to share the experience of live events, capturing a wider audience and the attention of a greater number of potential consumers.

4.2.2 Experience and segmentation in festival management

Aşan et al. ( 2020 ) found that experience in music festivals depends on four specific dimensions—aesthetics, which refers to tourists’ evaluation of festivals’ physical environment; entertainment, that is, the active or passive participation of tourists in watching shows; the opportunity to escape daily life, become immersed in a different context, and live a separate experience; and education, that is, gaining new skills and knowledge from the experience of participation. The four dimensions contribute to the formation of participants’ perceived value of the festival, which is a significant mediator between experience and satisfaction. The general conditions in which festivals are organized are often complex, spontaneous, and sometimes unexpected (Laberschek et al. 2020 ). Therefore, going beyond these general dimensions is critical. Other factors should be considered to increase the value promoted by a specific music festival. Because festivals are often devoted to a particular music or art genre, segmentation is one of the most critical elements of managerial strategies.

The segmentation of music festival attendees is considered to be extremely dependent on context (Kim and Kang 2022 ). For example, Kinnunen et al. ( 2018 ) studied Finnish rhythm music festival audiences and identified three segments—omnivores and the loyal heavy tribe, which represent the oldest attendees, and the hedonistic dance crowd, which represents the youngest attendees. Mallette et al. ( 2018 ) discussed the niche example of military music festivals. The authors found two main dimensions of audience segmentation—the appeal of the event and the degree of affinity—that produce different levels of motivation to participate. Roll et al. ( 2014 ) showed the importance of place and the medium of live operas, as they are meaningful for attendees. In particular, consumers consider opera from a holistic viewpoint. Therefore, brand communication should include the fact that the meaning of results differ depending on the samples. There are examples of specific techniques of segmentation. For example, Kruger and Viljoen ( 2021 ) use psychographic segmentation to identify three distinct segments of attendees. They considered motives for attending, behavioral intentions, and global causes aimed at eradicating poverty. The research shows the relevance of segmentation in valorizing the nature, objects, and goals of music festivals.

Modern music festivals have a more general background. Therefore, attendees are of various natures and have different music preferences. Consequently, to avoid problems related to the redundancy of festivals’ organization and commercial proposals, implementing innovation is critical. Li et al. ( 2017 ) identified a strategic factor for success in implementing innovation. In particular, they distinguished between stakeholders’ satisfaction, achieved through harmonious relationships, and process efficiency, achieved through functional relationships. The greater the extent of both relational characteristics (i.e., harmony and functionality), the greater the opportunity to achieve successful innovation implementation.

4.2.3 Sustainability in music festival management

Sustainability in festival and event management is closely related to the three traditional dimensions—economic, social, and environmental. Some studies have been devoted to sustainability management to achieve a better understanding of the actual interest of managers in the best practices for fostering the sustainable management of events. For example, Wickham et al. ( 2021 ) performed a qualitative analysis of 10 international music events and identified 14 best practices connected to sustainability. Economic sustainability was associated with attracting financial capital, artists, and performers; maintaining permanent management; and the reporting of event-related benefits. Social sustainability was associated with attracting experts and influential educators; the supply chain; and the reporting of event-related social benefits. Finally, environmental sustainability was associated with attendees and the behavior of supply chain partners.

At the same time, the research has clarified that the benefits connected to music festivals (e.g., financial and social benefits) are overestimated by participants and urban communities. Nevertheless, eventual negative effects, such as pollution, parking difficulties, and traffic congestion, are often anticipated and resolved by festival promoters (Han et al. 2017 ).

However, sustainability seems not to be a priority of music festivals. Dodds et al. ( 2020 ) found that 64% of Canadian music festivals included in their sample did not communicate about their sustainability practices. Moreover, only 6% of them concentrated their sustainability campaign on social media, even though the literature shows that active communication is critical for developing and maintaining good relationships with participants (Luonila and Kinnunen 2019 ). Contemporary music festivals have critical socio-spatial consequences and meanings; consumers try to co-create authentic experiences from their participation, even though the nature of such experiences can be considered a commercial imperative (Szmigin et al. 2017 ). Co-creation was connected to the sustainability of festivals in the work of Werner et al. ( 2019 ), who identified three categories of festivals attendees—the sustainable co-creation type, focused on the creation of an altruistic environment; the experience co-creation type, focused on the contradiction between real life and the experience of festivals; and the calculating co-creation type, who weight the processes of giving and acquiring value from the experience of festivals. In this sense, the benefits associated with music festivals are co-created by both attendees and organizers. Therefore, identifying the most relevant stakeholders is critical for the diffusion of the idea of festival sustainability.

Relationships and collaboration between festival managers and stakeholders, including the attendees’ perspectives, can foster the incorporation of sustainability practices. According to Hazel and Mason ( 2020 ), if sustainability is defined as a core value of music festivals, forms of collaboration such as sponsorship contracts can encourage the development of relationships among stakeholders who share the same sustainable values. Therefore, identifying the right stakeholders can bolster festivals’ financial and cultural components, as well help integrate the original value of festivals and sustainability needs (Hazel and Mason 2020 ; Richardson 2018 ).

4.3 Musicians: identity and business models in the digital era

4.3.1 the complex nature of musicians’ identity.

The identity of musicians in the modern competitive music industry has been widely discussed in the literature. Schediwy et al. ( 2018 ) identified the dualistic nature of the scientific debate. On one hand, there is a considerable number of contributions that glorify the bohemian nature of the music profession. On the other hand, other papers recognize that assuming an entrepreneurial attitude is an unavoidable need for musicians. Moreover, keeping a stable identity is challenging for musicians, due to the instability of income, uncertainty, and exploitative tendencies in the market.

Schediwy et al. ( 2018 ) found that the separation between the bohemian and the entrepreneurial identity of musicians is less evident in young musicians. In particular, two factors contribute to the formation of musicians’ identity, open-mindedness and career-mindedness, which combine the bohemian nature of the music profession with the necessary market orientation.

The relationship between musicians’ artistic and entrepreneurial identity has been recently studied by Pizzolitto ( 2021 ). His research revealed the profound dilemma between musicians’ traditional view of the art and the necessity to change and adapt their business models depending on the economic conditions. Everts and Haynes ( 2021 ) studied the contexts of the British and Dutch music markets and found that musicians’ entrepreneurial identity is based on the rapid change of musical contexts and local contexts. The Netherlands has been building an institutionalized pathway to let musicians’ artistic needs meet their entrepreneurial sensibility. Nevertheless, according to their research, the conditions that musicians have to face in pursuing their music careers are extremely complex. For example, opportunities are inversely proportional to the number of young aspiring musicians; only a small proportion of musicians achieve a successful career; and digitalization, which seemed to be a possible way to increase the number of successful independent musicians, will probably reduce their opportunities over time.

This tendency is quite common in the world. Güven ( 2020 ) considered the music environment in Turkey and found that musicians there are experiencing increasing difficulties in their creative work. In fact, they do not talk about solidarity in the music world. Instead, they talk of the increasing commodification of music where solid experience and career building seem to be an illusion. Therefore, we have to ask why there are always more young people trying to establish a career in music (Everts and Haynes 2021 ).

4.3.2 The changing and multifaced business models of musicians

Musicians need to diversify their business models by composing, producing, and distributing their music. Given the degree of technological evolution, understanding the future of independent musicians’ business models is complicated. A considerable number of musicians have experienced a decline after the digital revolution in terms of professional studio performance and recording (Herbst and Albrecht 2018 ). Nevertheless, in this framework, music is the principal service in a portfolio of services entirely managed by musicians (Eiriz and Leite 2017 ). Therefore, even if a musician’s self-image and career goals remained the same before and after the digital revolution, there is a general consensus in the music market regarding the fact that the way to achieve career objectives has changed (Schwetter 2016 ).

In new business models, collaboration and cooperation between governmental and non-governmental organizations, among different kinds of art and culture, and among artists seems to guarantee partial independence from record contracts (Ibrahimova 2019 ). For example, in the hip hop environment, Carter and Welsh ( 2018 ) found that collaboration among rappers increases their visibility. Among hip hop artists, there is a tendency to abandon record contracts to pursue a solitary career. A specific example is Alessandro Aleotti (alias J Ax) in Italy who in 2013 decided to quit his contract with New Sound and start his own record label called Newtopia with another famous Italian hip hop artist, Federico Leonard Lucia (alias Fedez).

The choices of independent musicians and labels about where and what to record are extremely contextual and related to the need for non-traditional recording locations (Walzer 2016 ). The role of musicians, producers, and labels are often linked and therefore confused. Consequently, the quantification of their contribution to the production of independent music is complex. Nevertheless, the evidence shows that producers’, musicians’, and sound engineers’ contributions are critical for communication during the decision-making process (Walzer 2016 ).

In summary, the evidence in the literature underlines the complexity of the music market for musicians. This precondition could lead to the reasonable conclusion that musicians should dedicate much more time to the commercial side of their work. Nevertheless, and counterintuitively, publications show that musicians still devote most of their time to creative work. Everts et al. ( 2021 ) studied the early career experiences of Dutch musicians and found that the strong dynamicity of the music industry does not change the perceived high value of being musicians. In fact, musicians do not spend their time trying to boost their position on social networks because they perceive that the funds needed to flourish in that environment are becoming prohibitive. Therefore, they devote their time to creation and to the development of their fan base outside the internet. Finally, they show to enjoy the entrepreneurial part of their activity.

Consequently, the digital revolution, together with the persisting situation of oligopoly in the market, allowed musicians to abandon the idea of record contracts and to embrace self-promotion through self-publishing and self-management (Schwetter 2016 ). The instability of direct revenue experienced by independent musicians and labels resulted in a substantial change after the digital revolution. The digitalization of music had a dramatic impact on musicians’ activity, particularly for independent musicians who are becoming more than composers and who are developing entrepreneurial skills that were traditionally the purview of labels and agencies (Eiriz and Leite 2017 ). Moreover, laws and regulation for the management of copyright have been designed to improve consumers’ interests and rights and show weakness in the connection between copyright and the collective needs of management organizations, thus resulting in an unfair advantage for major labels (Schroff and Street 2017 ).

5 Future research opportunities

Based on the content analysis in the previous section, multiple future research opportunities can be identified. These opportunities emerge with the same distribution as the themes and subthemes from the grounded theory analysis. Table 1 presents a summary of the most relevant research questions that have been deduced from the articles’ contents.

Concerning the role of digitalization in the revolution of the music market, the analysis showed that it contributed to recovering from the previous period of stagnation (e.g., Dellyana et al. 2017 ). Therefore, future research can examine the contribution of specific factors that may or may not be connected with the technological revolution in more depth. In particular, it can concentrate more on the new forms of financing (e.g., crowdfunding) and their influence on the growth of the music industry. Moreover, researchers can perform in-depth analysis of the determinants of the major labels’ ability to maintain their leadership position after the digital revolution (Guichardaz et al. 2019 ). In particular, researchers can concentrate on the effect of a set of variables that exclude financial logic. Furthermore, as this market condition allows two different levels of competition, researchers could focus on the commonalities and differences that can emerge from the study of this dualism.

Trabucchi et al. ( 2017 ) reflected on the opportunity for artists and labels to base their competition strategies on the concept of “meaning.” More conceptual papers on this topic should be published to allow music actors to embrace new strategies connected to this concept. In particular, theoretical articles could help artists and labels better connect their visions, missions, and brands in a practical execution of “meaning” for their products.

Concerning the position of major labels and their permanent leadership position in the market, research on this is based on consumers’ expectations about hedonic performances (Chen et al. 2018 ). In particular, the logic of differentiation could reduce the distance between the two levels of competition that emerged in the music market. Therefore, more research on single case studies is needed to understand what elements allow minor artists to emerge without having access to major artists’ financial and power-related assets. Specifically, research should concentrate on the conditions that allow the reduction or elimination of barriers that traditionally impede the emergence of minor artists and labels (e.g., Pillai et al. 2021 ; Walzer 2016 ). Finally, researchers should help minor labels and artists find better applications of existing technologies characterized by low costs.

One of the positive effects of the digital revolution is that the available technology allows artists and producers to be more creative in their work. Therefore, new variables have started to affect the basis of consumers’ access to music listening. Even if research has found some interesting connections between critical variables (e.g., advertising and reservation; Li et al. 2020 ) and the new forms of consumer access to music listening, more empirical research and case studies are needed to fully understand this phenomenon. Moreover, technology has made consumer research related to music easier and more efficient. Nevertheless, it seems that this condition has not changed the general competition in the music market. Therefore, more empirical research is needed to understand the mediators and moderators of consumers’ opportunities to satisfy their music needs via alternative music and independent artists. In other words, research should study new methods for improving the opportunities for minor artists and independent labels using the existing technological instruments.

Concerning the negative effects of the digital revolution on the music markets, research has focused on the complex conditions of local record and music stores. In this regard, more conceptual papers are needed to evaluate new forms of experiential content through which local record stores can overcome the current crisis. Moreover, empirical analyses should be performed to obtain a deeper understanding of the cultural elements that increase consumers’ tendency to avoid traditional purchasing methods.

Multiple papers have debated the role of music festivals in business and management studies. Music festivals are widely recognized as complex phenomena in which the management instruments needed to achieve results should be organized and planned using holistic and innovative logic (Laberschek et al. 2020 ). Empirical research in this field has been sufficiently developed, and the literature indirectly calls for more conceptual studies. Specifically, it seems that in this field, practice is more advanced and faster compared with theory. Therefore, theoretical research should concentrate on multidisciplinary issues to ensure that festival managers have opportunities to build their style while drawing on solid and consolidated theoretical foundations; this will limit the chaotic and unpredictable events occurring in festivals at present.

First, the theoretical papers concentrate on the connection between chaos theory and management, applying these connections to music festival management. It is necessary to theorize new advancements in chaos management before they are applied in practice. Music festival management needs to refer to innovative and challenging management theory to develop new methods of obtaining economic, financial, social, and sustainable results from the event organization.

Second, conceptual research should be performed to increase the understanding of elements that improve consumers’ experience during festivals. Theorizing about management methods for niche festivals in which a specific kind of music is considered can help organizations stimulate consumers’ experience. In particular, theoretical studies of the foundation of the internationalization of festivals referring specifically to niche festivals can be critical for finding solutions to management issues (da Cunha Brandão and Oliveira 2019 ).

Third, the literature firmly calls for a better understanding of the conceptual foundations of the concept of value in music festivals. Holism, post-co-creativism, and the control of socioeconomic turbulence and chaotic issues related to the management of festivals are widely recognized as powerful instruments for value creation (e.g., Gozini and Tseane-Gumbi 2017 ; Robertson et al. 2018 ). Moreover, co-creation and co-innovation seem to play a critical role in the panorama of actors involved in these events. Similar practical consideration represents a strong call for pushing conceptual analyses to a higher level; in this way, management theory can overcome the limitations of being directly connected to managerial practices and can achieve a superior stage of abstraction.

In addition to the need for theoretical research, more empirical research is needed on the role of the music market in sustainability issues. There is still a distance between the sincere interest in sustainability management and its realization (e.g., Richardson 2019 ; Raffay-Danyi and Formadi 2022 ). Therefore, empirical research should consider single and multiple case studies concerning the positive effect on consumers’ experience and the benefits resulting from the application of sustainability management practices. A case study should be performed using longitudinal logic to highlight differences in terms of praxis and results and to guide future management when it comes to investing time and resources in implementing such logic efficiently.

Finally, the literature revealed considerable interest in the dualism between music and profits. The problem of musicians being reluctant to be considered entrepreneurs has been studied in a number of empirical publications. A possible promising lens for analysis could come from the psychological theory of professional identity (e.g., Marcia 1966 ). In particular, the literature could benefit from more qualitative research based on in-depth interviews and surveys analyzing the status of musicians’ identities in depth. The final aim of this research is to understand what identity status can lead musicians to overcome the obstacle of their reluctance to consider music in the same manner as all other fields. In this sense, more historical research could be beneficial to overcome the dualism between art and entrepreneurship. Harbor ( 2020 ) demonstrated that a considerable number of marketing interventions were used during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to promote music concerts and the arts. More historical references to the connection between entrepreneurship and the arts could be helpful in overcoming this problematic dualism.

6 Discussion and managerial implications

In the last decade, the music market has been greatly affected by the digital revolution, and technology has caused profound internal changes. This revolution has increased the opportunity for the diffusion of music through several services, means, and platforms, even though the oligopoly of major labels has continued to dominate the market. Nevertheless, the exploitation of these new opportunities is limited by the high level of financial and technical resources needed to access innovative technologies. Therefore, although the digital revolution has increased opportunities for minor artists and labels, the competition is still divided into two levels—the oligopoly of major labels and artists and the super competition of minor labels and artists. To overcome this limitation, futuristic strategies need to be conceptualized and operationalized, and most probably they will be based on the concept of “meaning” (Trabucchi et al. 2017 ).

Papies and van Heerde ( 2017 ) identified concerts as one of the most powerful instruments through which minor artists can improve their opportunities to flourish. The empirical literature concentrates on understanding the effects of specific management styles on the organization of events and festivals. Therefore, there is evidence of the fundamental role that concerts and live events will play in the future. Events are seen as chaotic and complex phenomena in which managerial styles cannot be centered on the organization but have to be based on co-creation and co-innovation, promoting revolutionary organization initiatives to enhance opportunities for minor artists and labels to emerge and succeed. Co-creation and co-innovation should be achieved through the involvement of musicians, record labels, and consumers, resulting in a mutually useful network in which access to high levels of financial resources is not an issue. In this sense, the philosophy through which musicians should interpret their role in society has to change in order to promote their role as self-entrepreneurs and to develop their business identity.

This review led to the identification of numerous managerial implications, mainly concentrated on event and store management, sustainable management logic, and the condition of musicians in the market. In terms of improving consumer engagement, managers should place more emphasis on consumers’ preferences than on the cost of performance (Kim et al. 2022 ). The literature highlights that consumers are still interested in the principal product of the music market— music (Papies and van Heerde 2017 ). In this sense, particular attention has to be paid to music festivals and events. During festivals, the aesthetic of the offering has been recognized as a fundamental factor in achieving the events’ objectives. Furthermore, surprising consumers with unique stimuli is critical to increase their engagement (Loureiro et al. 2021 ). In fact, organizations should challenge the status quo by collecting as much information as possible on the changing nature of their audiences. Hiring a community manager who conducts research on social media and promotes events depending on the participants’ preferences can be a strategic factor in improving the quality of integrated communication between organizations and consumers and in increasing loyalty among attendees (Llopis-Amorós et al. 2018 ). Moreover, managers should go beyond adapting their organizations to the changes related to social media platforms and should build solid relationships with their customers, thus increasing the opportunity to achieve greater loyalty and improving their opportunity to involve consumers in the process of co-creation (Choi and Burnes 2017 ).

The literature discusses sustainable management logic. In general, overcoming the traditional barriers and roles in management logic seems to be fundamental for the future of marketing strategies in this field (Vendrell-Herrero 2018 ). In particular, Kullak et al. ( 2021 ) suggested that managers of minor organizations should develop and coordinate a network in which actors have access to relevant resources. Moreover, as there is evidence about the difficult conditions of advertisement-related returns, music suppliers should differentiate their policies depending on this variable. Li et al. ( 2020 ) recommended that managers should choose an ownership, subscription, or mixed-pricing model according to their level of advertisement returns.

Sustainable management in music should be achieved through improving communication between suppliers and customers. In particular, it is perceived as critical to develop technological tools to allow for the establishment and maintenance of a relationship between distributors and consumers (Tran et al. 2018 ). In this sense, the literature recognizes that the technological revolution is one of the most important opportunities for music managers to change their organizational logic. Technology “favour[s] smaller, more flexible companies that are more conducive to innovation” (Renard and Hallam 2018 , p 182). Firms should put their traditional models and decision-making procedures under review, concentrating on changing definition of “meaning” that music consumers adopt over time (Trabucchi et al. 2017 ).

The problem of sustainability has also been analyzed in light of the difficulties that small music enterprises face when it comes to accessing high levels of financial support. For example, Andersén et al. ( 2019 ) showed that to improve their growth opportunities, small firms can exploit their relationships with environmental-oriented suppliers and their ability to develop green purchasing capabilities. The sustainable management logic also relates to an improvement in the congruency between in-store background music and the purchase experience that sellers want their customers to have. The literature highlights the importance of the correlation between advertising, music, and all other stimuli and environments in which purchasing takes place (Michel et al. 2017 ). In fact, the correct combination of music and advertising can be useful for changing brand perceptions. For example, an intense sound and low pitch can communicate masculinity, whereas high-pitched sounds can communicate femininity (Zoghaib 2019 ). Moreover, empirical evidence has shown that major tones and faster tempos improve the purchase experience (Liu et al. 2022 ). Music associated with different levels of arousal can be used to manipulate consumers’ feelings; for instance, uncomfortable situations can be smoothed out through background music characterized by low levels of arousal (Roy and Das 2022 ). Stable tonal structures can induce cheerfulness, whereas unstable tonal structures communicate sadness (Zoghaib 2019 ). Therefore, if sellers want to prolong consumers’ purchasing experiences and in-store visits, they should choose music of a low tempo and volume (Michel et al. 2017 ).

The literature discusses the position of musicians in the music business. In particular, various articles debate the opportunities that music allows professionals depending on their level of popularity. For example, Papies and van Heerde ( 2017 ) observed that concerts are critical for both famous musicians and musicians who are not famous. For famous musicians, concerts represent an opportunity to consolidate their position in the market. For less famous artists, concerts should be considered marketing strategies to increase their popularity, that is, as launching pads for their future careers.

7 Conclusions

Music comprises a dynamic, complex, and chaotic environment in which futuristic management styles and co-creation, co-innovation, and post co-creation logics should be considered in planning and operationalizing strategies at every level of competition. Although the digital revolution has transformed many aspects of the music business and management, several issues continue to limit its evolution. This SLR clarified that in the future, a considerably relevant role will be played by events, festivals, and concerts whereby innovative managerial styles can overcome the complex conditions of minor artists and labels and allow them to flourish. Nevertheless, the picture of music generated from the literature is still evolving. The future of the field seems to demand higher levels of philosophy around business issues and management styles through which obstacles relating to the position of musicians as entrepreneurs will be overcome, and products will be considered for their meaning rather than for their cost.

Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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The Music Industry in the 2020s

By: Govert Vroom, Isaac Sastre Boquet, Abhishek Deshmane

Since the emergence of digital technologies in the 1990s the music industry has been in a state of constant disruption. In a world where multiple media compete for the attention of individuals…

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Since the emergence of digital technologies in the 1990s the music industry has been in a state of constant disruption. In a world where multiple media compete for the attention of individuals through multiple channels, the ways people all over the world are now creating, distributing, and consuming music seem to be more diverse than ever. This note describes the current state of the industry, the value chain, its actors (artists, music labels, distributors, and others), and the existing -and emerging- business models.

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Charted: The impact of streaming on the music industry

Widespread adoption of music streaming services has helped turn the music industry’s fortunes around. Image:  Unsplash/Filip

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Stay up to date:, the digital economy.

• Worldwide recorded music revenues totalled $26.2 billion last year, up 9% from the previous year’s total of $24 billion, as this Statista chart shows.
• Last year, digital music accounted for the lion's share of worldwide music revenues, with streaming services alone accounting for 67% of the industry’s total haul.
• This article explains how the transition to digital distribution has both fuelled the music industry's decline and stopped it.

2022 was another good year for the music industry. According to IFPI’s latest Global Music Report, worldwide recorded music revenues totaled $26.2 billion last year, up 9 percent from the previous year’s total of $24 billion. This marks the eighth consecutive year of growth for the global music industry after nearly two decades of gradual decline. Interestingly, the transition to digital distribution has both fueled the music industry’s decline and helped stop it. After the golden age of the CD, which propelled worldwide music revenues to unprecedented highs through the 1990s, the advent of MP3 and filesharing hit the music industry like an earthquake. Between 2001 and 2010, physical music sales declined by more than 60 percent, wiping out $14 billion in annual revenue. During the same period, digital music sales grew from zero to almost $4 billion, which wasn’t even remotely enough to offset the drop in CD sales. It wasn’t until the appearance and widespread adoption of music streaming services that the music industry’s fortunes began turning around again.

According to data published by IFPI, the music industry bottomed out in 2014, when revenue was at a 20-year low of $13.1 billion, $9 billion less than it had been 15 years prior, when physical music sales alone had amounted to $22.3 billion at the peak of the CD era. After some initial hesitance by the music industry to embrace streaming services, record labels and artists appear to have followed consumers’ lead in accepting that the future of music lies in digital distribution. Last year, digital music accounted for the lion's share of worldwide music revenues, with streaming services alone accounting for 67 percent of the industry’s total haul. According to IFPI, 589 million people were using a paid music streaming subscription by the end of 2022 and streaming revenues are now considerably bigger than digital download sales ever were.

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The evolution of the music industry — and what it means for marketing yourself as a musician.

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Founder and EIC of  Now Entertainment , Personal Branding/Public Relations Expert.

For many fans of music, the saying, "We are not in Kansas anymore," rings truer than ever before. While it is evident that the content of the audio version of the entertainment industry has changed, there is a lot more that is different about what we now listen to and enjoy. Fans might be adjusting their tastes and preferences to the new sounds on the airwaves, but on the other side, artists are also facing a drastic shock. The tides of music production and marketing are moving fast, and only those strong enough to ride along will be left standing.

My business started as a recording studio and later grew into a full-service media company. Through this experience, I've seen how the music industry has evolved, as well as learned a few best practices on how independent musicians can adapt.

How has the music industry evolved?

Through the past 30 years, the way music is made and distributed has varied dramatically. The rise of the internet from the late 1990s has played a crucial role in how music is consumed globally, setting up a butterfly effect that inadvertently affects how musicians and artists are compensated and paid.

For a long time, the music industry has relied predominantly on traditional record labels. Both creators and consumers were completely at the mercy of the labels, and music preferences were heavily influenced by whatever happened to be in circulation. The label was the be-all and end-all of the artist’s career, deciding everything from marketing budgets to video sets and tour dates. I've seen some argue that the artistic expression of a true musician is heavily censored by what record labels consider to be marketable.

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As the early 2000s set in, the power dynamics started to shift. Mobile phones became more popular, and  music streaming sites started to mean business . Consumers now had access that physical record stores no longer defined. The supply pool got bigger, putting the listener in charge of what was hot or not, but the relationship was still tilted. From my perspective, the musician was still away from the pulse, and interactions with fans were primarily happening at meet-and-greets and tour venues.

As the 2010s rolled in, social media was booming and, suddenly, the floodgates were opened. A whole world of possibility was evident to both creators and listeners. The fourth wall had been brought down, and there was no room for the voice behind the music to speak directly. Social media introduced a level of music promotion that I believe had been unprecedented in earlier years. More and more platforms were vying for people’s attention, so they introduced unlimited features to keep audiences entertained.

Now, I'm finding that traditional entertainment providers recognize a new market opportunity: streaming on-demand. Music is one of the most popular bite-sized forms of entertainment that exists in limitless genres, with the ability to hold attention for hours. Streaming on-demand may be the champion of indie artists, as it can help eliminate the bottlenecks of traditional record labels. But despite the broader opportunity for discovery streaming platforms can give music creators,  gaps still exist  and there is still a limited avenue for adequate compensation for the artist.

Another aspect that has greatly evolved is music distribution. Music distribution is a process where a music distribution firm signs a deal with a record label or artist, giving them the right to sell their music to various channels. Hence, a music distributor can only sell music to channels that have an account with said distributor. During the first decade of the new millennium, I found the use of digital distribution systems became more profound. Gone were the days when independent creators had to collaborate with or need the support of other agencies to share their music with the globe.

What does this mean for independent artists?

My company also assists musicians with services such as public relations and distribution, and independent musicians often ask me for ways to help get their music to a large audience. I always tell them the same thing: “Link up with music distribution channels.” Plainly speaking, if you are an independent artist and you want to get your music on streaming platforms around the globe, you need to get familiar with the various distribution platforms in use today. Examples of these include Music Gateway, AWAL, Horus Music and Songflowr.

Another great way to distribute your music is through conventional channels like YouTube and Amazon. You can earn revenue as an independent artist through YouTube. All you need to do is join its partner program and use ads to generate revenue. YouTube does this by matching ads with your channel and the fans who watch your videos.

After you release your music, you can also run ads on social media and hire influencers to promote your music. Ensure you know how to properly target your audience, however, or else you could waste a lot of money and see no return on investment. Some musicians might even opt to work with a public relations agent and service DJs before they release their music. Just keep in mind that, in my experience, outsourcing PR can cost you around $3,000 to $5,000, and DJ record pools can range from $200 to $2,000.

As we can see, music has evolved mainly because of technological advances and improvements in how things were done before. These advances have also brought in new opportunities for artists and entrepreneurs alike. In the coming years, I believe progress in the music industry will be largely dependent on these same factors.

Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?

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Georg cantor, the man who discovered different infinities, openmind books, scientific anniversaries, evolution of planet earth (ii): global cataclysms, featured author, latest book, the music industry in an age of digital distribution.

In 1999 the global recorded music industry had experienced a period of growth that had lasted for almost a quarter of a century. Approximately one billion records were sold worldwide in 1974, and by the end of the century, the number of records sold was more than three times as high. At the end of the nineties, spirits among record label executives were high and few music industry executives at this time expected that a team of teenage Internet hackers, led by Shawn Fanning (at the time a student at Northeastern University in Boston) would ignite the turbulent process that eventually would undermine the foundations of the industry.

Shawn Fanning created and launched a file sharing service called Napster that allowed users to download and share music without compensating the recognized rights holders. Napster was fairly quickly sued by the music industry establishment and was eventually forced to shut down the service. However, a string of other, increasingly sophisticated services immediately followed suit. Even though the traditional music industry used very aggressive methods, both legal and technical, to stop the explosion of online-piracy services such as Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, Grokster, DC++, and The Pirate Bay, it was to no avail. As soon as one file sharing service was brought to justice and required to cease its operations, new services emerged and took its place. By the end of 2013, the sales of physically distributed recorded music (e.g., cassettes, CD, vinyl) measured in unit sales, were back at the same relatively low levels of the early 1970s.

During the 15 years that has passed since Napster was launched, the music industry has been completely transformed and the model that ruled the industry during most of the past century has been largely abandoned.

This rapid transformation of the music industry is a classic example of how an innovation is able to disrupt an entire industry and make existing industry competencies obsolete. The power and influence of the pre-Internet music industry was largely based on the ability to control physical distribution. Internet makes physical music distribution increasingly irrelevant and the incumbent major music companies have been required to redefine themselves in order to survive. This chapter will examine the impact of the Internet on the music industry and present the state of the music industry in an age of digital distribution.

Three Music Industries

In order to understand the dynamics of the music industry, it is first of all necessary to recognize that the music industry is not one, but a number of different industries that are all closely related but which at the same time are based on different logics and structures. The overall music industry is based on the creation and exploitation of music-based intellectual properties. Composers and songwriters create songs, lyrics, and arrangements that are performed live on stage; recorded and distributed to consumers; or licensed for some other kind of use, for instance sheet music or as background music for other media (advertising, television, etc.). This basic structure has given rise to three core music industries: the recorded music industry—focused on recording and distribution of music to consumers; the music licensing industry—primarily licensing compositions and arrangements to businesses; and live music—focused on producing and promoting live entertainment, such as concerts, tours, etc. There are other companies that sometimes are recognized as members of the music industrial family, such as makers of music instruments, software, stage equipment, music merchandise, etc. However, while these are important industry sectors they are traditionally not considered to be integral parts of the industry’s core.

In the pre-Internet music industry, recorded music was the biggest of the three and the one that generated the most revenues. Most aspiring artists and bands in the traditional music industry dreamed about being able to sign a contract with a record label. A contract meant that the record label bankrolled a professional studio recording and allowed the artist entry into the record labels’ international distribution system, something which otherwise was beyond reach of most unsigned bands. The second music industry sector—music licensing—was much smaller and more mundane than the recorded music industry sector. Music publishers, who were operating in this business, were largely a business-to-business industry without any direct interaction with the audience. Their main responsibility was to ensure that license fees were collected when a song was used in whatever context and that these fees subsequently were fairly distributed among the composers and lyricists. The third music industry sector—live music—generated its revenues from sales of concert tickets. Although live music has a long and proud history, it came to play second fiddle to the recording industry during the twentieth century. Record sales was undoubtedly the most important revenue stream and record labels generally considered concert tours as a way to promote a studio album, and were not really concerned whether the tour was profitable or not. Sometimes the record label even paid  tour support , which would enable bands to go on tour and promote the album even though the actual tour was running with a loss.

This music industry structure, including the relationships between the three industries, was developed during the mid-twentieth century and was deeply cemented when the Internet emerged to challenge the entire system. The short-term impact of the Internet on the music industries primarily concerned the distribution of recorded music to consumers. This means that while the recorded music industry was severely affected by the loss of distribution control and rampant online piracy, the other two music industry sectors were initially left more or less unaffected. As a matter of fact, while the recorded music industry has suffered during the past 15 years, the other two industries have gained in strength and prominence. There are several reasons why this shift in balance has happened.

One of the primarily reasons is simply that as one revenue stream is diminishing, the music industry is required to reevaluate its other businesses and try to compensate for the lost revenues from recorded music by increasing revenues from music licensing and live music.

For instance, revenues from music licensing have more than doubled during the past 15 years due to new and more active licensing practices, but also due to the fact that the media industries have changed in a similar way as the music industry. There are now considerably more television channels, radio channels, videogames, Internet websites, and other outlets than only two decades ago, and most of these outlets need music as their primary or secondary content. Music publishers have also in general been more nimble than the record labels to address the demand from new media outlets. A clear example of how music publishers changed their business practices is how they strive to establish themselves as a one-stop shop for musical intellectual properties, where media outlets can clear all their music licenses with a single contract. That may sound like an obvious service, but in the traditional music industry it was not always the case. Rather, there was one legal entity holding the rights to the composition and another legal entity controlling the rights of the recording of the musical work (the  master ). Music publishers in the age of digital distribution increasingly control both the master and the composition, which makes the licensing process more efficient. The music licensing industry has during the past 15 years evolved into the most profitable music industry sector and is often also considered as the most innovative and agile sector of the three.

While music licensing is the most profitable music industry sector, live music has developed into the largest music sector. There is a fairly straightforward explanation why live music has experienced a surge during the past 15 years. Live music is simply easier to control than recorded music. A musical band that is in demand can grow their revenues from live music by increasing the number of concerts and raising the ticket prices. Even though the financial crisis of 2007–08 put a dent in the growth of the live music industry, it has nevertheless surpassed the recorded music industry in size. During most of the second half of the previous century, the largest music company was a record company, but after the Internet transformation of the music industry the world’s largest music company is Live Nation, a U.S.-based live music company spun off from Clear Channel in 2005. This is a further marker of the changing power relationships in the music industry. It should be noted, though, that the boundaries between the three industries are not as clear as they were during the pre-Internet era. Music companies, including Live Nation, serve as a general business partner to artists and composers and support their activities regardless of whether they concern live concerts, merchandise, licensing, or distribution and promotion of recorded music to consumers. This means that it is no longer entirely easy to categorize a music company into one of the three industries, but, nevertheless, in the case of Live Nation its revenues are still mainly generated via live concerts, which still makes it relevant to refer to them as primarily a live music company.

This section has presented how the three main music industry sectors have been affected by the introduction of the Internet and how the size, strength, routines, and relationships between the industry sectors have been transformed. The next section will turn its attention specifically to recorded music and examine how new business models for music distribution may be able to lead the recorded music industry on a path toward recovery.

A Growing Digital Music Market

The music industry went to great lengths at the beginning of the century to put a stop to online piracy; however, they were not equally ambitious and innovative in developing new models for legal online distribution. Certainly, there were a few feeble attempts from the major record labels at the time, but the most important criterion in the development of these services seemed to be that they should not in any way threaten the existing revenue streams but should only add additional revenue to the companies. The majors did succeed with one of their goals, which is that the new services should not compete with the existing physical sales. However, unfortunately the services could not compete with anything, especially not with online piracy.

The first company that was able to create a successful online service for legal sales and distribution of music was not a music industry player at all—it was Apple Computer (as it was called at the time). In 2003, Apple was able to convince the major labels that music consumers would buy music legally if they were offered an extremely simple service that allowed them to buy and download music for less than a dollar per track. The service was called iTunes Music Store. In one sense,

iTunes was a radical change for the music industry. It was the first online retailer that was able to offer the music catalogs from all the major music companies, it used an entirely novel pricing model, and it allowed consumers to de-bundle the music album and only buy the tracks that they actually liked.

On the other hand, iTunes can also be considered as a very careful and incremental innovation, as the major labels’ positions and power structures remained largely unscathed. The rights holders still controlled their properties and the structures that guided the royalties paid per every track that was sold was predictable and transparent. Apple were correct in their prediction of consumer behavior and the iTunes Music Store can not be considered as anything but an enormous success. In 2013, iTunes Music Store is the world’s largest music retailer (offline and online) and it has sold more than 25 billion songs since its launch in 2003. The service has evolved substantially during its decade-long existence, and a number of competitors using more or less the same business model have entered the digital download music market. Even though the competition has increased, iTunes remains on top with a market share of more than 50 percent of the global digital music market. Figure 1 indicates how the global recorded music market has evolved since 1973, and shows that while the digital music market has been able to partially compensate for the decline of physical sales, the total recorded music market still has lost more than 50 percent of its sales since the peak in 1999.

Recorded Music Volume, 1973–2012. Note: Digital includes full-length albums and singles split by 4. Vinyl includes LPs and EPs split by 4. Music DVDs are not included. Source: IFPI 2013

While digital download services, such as iTunes Music Store, introduce a gradual change to the music business logic, there are other legal music services that are far more radical and thereby also far more controversial. These services do not offer individual tracks for purchase at a set price—they rather offer the users  access  to a large music library that they are able to listen to at their leisure. The users normally pay a monthly subscription fee that allows them to listen to as many songs in the library as they want, how often as they want.

This may sound like an appealing proposition, but these legal  access-based  music services have struggled both to convince record labels to license their catalogs to the services as well as to convince users that it is possible to enjoy music without actually buying and owning a copy of the track or album.

There is a considerable entrepreneurial activity in this segment of the music business, and services go live and bust on a weekly basis. Many service providers are still desperately looking for the business model that can attract music listeners and satisfy rights holders. The challenges are certainly considerable but the music service that so far has received the most attention of the international music industry and the one that could possibly have found the right path is a service called Spotify. Spotify is a useful vehicle for explaining the logic of the music industry in the age of digital distribution, and this section will present how service drives the music industrial transformation forward. Even if it eventually turns out that Spotify is unable to create a business model that is sustainable in the long term, it has already been able to transform the mindsets of both users and rights holders and will most likely be a music technological milestone on the magnitude of the Walkman, the Compact Disc, and Apple iTunes.

The Emergence of Access-Based Music Services

Spotify was founded in 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon with the ambition to create a legal ad-supported music service that was free for the music listener but that generated licensing revenues to copyright holders.

Spotify was by no means the first attempt to create a legal service that could compete with illegal file sharing. Most predecessors had for various reasons failed miserably with their projects, which may be one reasonable explanation why the rights holders that Spotify was negotiating with were not particularly enthusiastic about engaging in another risky online music project. Despite all their initial skepticism, on October 7, 2008, the company announced that after two years of discussions and negotiations, they had signed agreements with the music industry’s leading rights holders to distribute their music to audiences in a handful of European countries. In order to succeed where many others had failed, Spotify had been forced to make a number of concessions. In addition to offering the major rights holders shares in the company, they were also required to implement a fundamental change in their business model. Instead of offering a service that was solely funded by ads, they also developed a more advanced version of the service, which was funded by subscription fees.

Spotify’s model with two or more different service versions where the most basic version is free and the more advanced versions are offered on a subscription basis is usually called  freemium —a play on the words  free  and  premium . Often, the profit margin for the free version is very low, or even negative, and it is expected that it is the subscription fees that will generate enough revenues to make the service profitable. The logic behind a freemium service model is that users shall be willing to use the service for free and that they while using the service gradually will make behavioral and emotional investments in the service that will increase the costs and efforts to switch to another service. The goal is to make as many of the users of the free version to convert to the subscription version. In order to achieve that goal, the free version has to have a number of increasingly annoying features (such as advertising) or lack a few key features (such as the ability to use the service on certain devices) that are removed/available on the premium versions of the service. The challenge for Spotify and other freemium services is to balance the different versions in a way that stimulates the  right  customer behavior and entices users to become paying subscribers. To date, few music services manage this feat. Either the free version has been too good to motivate customers to upgrade their service or it has been too deprived of features to attract customers at all. In Spotify’s case they have achieved a  conversion rate  of approximately 20 percent, which means that 20 percent of the total user base is using the premium version and pay a monthly subscription fee.

Spotify has received a considerable amount of attention from the music industry across the world, but some of this attention has been largely based on suspicion and criticism toward their business model and methods. The criticism has to some extent focused on whether the freemium model presented above is long-term sustainable or not, but even stronger criticism has been focused on how the revenues have been shared with rights holders on different levels in the value chain. There are at least two reasons why this criticism has emerged. First of all, music companies have since decades back been used to a royalty model where a licensee pays a fixed amount per song sold, played, or used in whatever way. That model is very difficult to apply to an access-based service since the revenues that are generated by the service is not based on songs sold, played, or used, but based on the number of users of the service. Providers of access-based music services—regardless if the services are funded by subscriptions or advertising—have argued that rather than paying a fixed amount per track that is listened to, they should simply share whatever revenues are generated with the rights holders. Without getting too deep into the accounting detail, such a scheme is very beneficial to the service provider but transfer a considerable part of the business risk to rights holders.

Rights holders argue that their revenues should not depend on the skills of the service’s advertising sales team, but they should simply get paid for the music distributed to customers. In the past, a number of access-based service providers have been required to sign contracts that have generated fixed royalties per track to rights holders. However, such agreements make it very difficult to get an access-based music service off the ground, and several pioneers in the access-based music service market have not been able to survive for very long. One of the reasons why Spotify is considered as a milestone in the shaping of the new music economy is that the company seems to have successfully convinced the major music companies in certain markets that they should indeed share Spotify’s business risk and instead of taking a fixed license fee per track, they should take a share of Spotify’s revenue, regardless of how high or low it is. Spotify succeeded by making a number of concessions in their negotiations, for instance by offering the major music companies the opportunity to buy a minority share of Spotify’s shares.

Spotify has reported that 70 percent of their revenues from ads and subscriptions has been paid in royalties to rights holders. At the end of 2013, the company has generated more than a billion dollars for rights holders around the world, which according to Spotify is proof that their model does work.

However, even though it seems possible to generate revenues from access-based music services, the new contract structure is a radical change in the music business attitude toward distributors, and it is by no means uncontroversial. Some of the criticisms expressed by artists and composers are caused by the fact that the royalties are primarily paid by the service providers to music companies and not directly to the composers, musicians, or artists. The creatives argue that they are not given a fair share of the revenues and some of them even actively choose not to license their music to the services such as Spotify because the revenues that end up in their pockets is almost ridiculously low and that they do not want to support a corrupt and unsustainable system.

One reason why this problem has occurred is a debate about the classification of the royalties generated by access-based music services. Music companies (i.e., in this case the old record companies) claim that the royalties shall be considered as unit-based music sales, which in that case would mean that the musicians receive between 10 and 20 percent of the royalties paid by Spotify to the music companies. The musicians claim on the other hand that Spotify cannot be compared to traditional record sales at all but should rather be categorized as a performance, which in that case would mean that the musicians are entitled to 50 percent of the revenues rather than 20. The conflict concerns to a great extent the interpretation of agreements between record companies and artists that were established before Spotify and even the Internet existed. The debate about what type of royalty a particular Internet-based music service should generate may seem like a legal issue with minor real-world implication, but it is an absolutely crucial question that will determine the structure of the future of the music industry. Much is at stake and it is unlikely that the music industry players will easily agree on a model that is perceived as fair to all parties.

This section has discussed the emergence of access-based music services and the challenges they have encountered as they try to enter the digital music economy. The next section takes this discussion one step forward by reflecting on how these services change the audiences’ relationships with music. The section argues that access-based music is merely a transitional phase in the evolution of a new music economy and points at indications of how the industry increases its reliance on so-called context-based features and services.

The Real-Time Listening Experience

While revenues from recorded music have fallen dramatically during the past 15 years, people across the world do not listen less to music—rather they listen to more recorded music than ever before.

Recorded music permeates every aspect of our daily lives and legal access-based music services combined with illegal online file sharing services means that more or less every song is available everywhere, all the time. This  access explosion  transforms the way people use and relate to recorded music.

For instance, in the pre-Internet days recorded music was expensive and scarce. Music listeners chose what record to buy with care and the growing record collection in their living room cabinets served as a diary of their lives told via a number of record purchases. Music listeners  owned  their physical records in the same way as they had a strong sense of ownership about other physical objects, such as books, souvenirs, or furniture, and these objects served as tools for both identity formation and communication.

Institutions, such as  collection  and  ownership , become increasingly irrelevant in the age of digital distribution and ubiquitous access to music. In the light of this observation, a relevant question is what the new role of recorded music as an identity marker in the age of digital distribution may be. The retrospective record collection served as such an identity marker in the pre-Internet age, but as music listeners abandon their physical collections they are required to search for new ways to use recorded music as a tool for communication of their identities to their friends and the world. The scenes that are increasingly used for that purpose are online-based social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Access-based music services are commonly interconnected with such social network services, and thereby allow music listeners to constantly announce to the world what track they are currently listening to. This stream of information is primarily of interest to advertising platforms and their clients since it allows them to profile the audience based on their listening habits and send them advertising messages that are adapted to their demographics and interests.

The shift from the  retrospective collection  to the  real-time listening experience  is a radical shift in music listeners’ relationship to music. It diminishes the significance of the memory of past music experiences and moves the focus to the here and the now. It is interesting to note the kind of structures and behaviors that emerge as music consumption shifts from  ownership  to  access  and from  the collection  to the  now playing . Amaral et al. (2009) have, for instance, shown that music listeners actively curate their music-listening feed in order to make sure that it does not reveal a track that does not fit with the image they want to exhibit. Some access-based music services have even created a “private-listening feature” in order to enable users to listen to music without sharing the experience with the world.

The access-based services are still in their early days and they still actively search for the optimal service and pricing structure that will allow them to compete and survive. Currently, the competition between the services is largely based on the size of their music catalogs, availability in different territories and different mobile platforms, etc. However, it is reasonable to assume that eventually all these services will asymptotically converge toward a similar music offering and will be available on all platforms and include more or less every song that has ever been recorded. According to basic economic theory, the competition between similar services or products will be based on price, profit margins will eventually shrink, and a few large players will eventually survive and compete in an oligopolistic market. Access-based music services will in other words become a commodity market and behave in a similar way as the markets for sugar or oil.

When the market has reached this gloomy state and the room for innovation and differentiation based on the pure access model is more or less exhausted, online music service providers will most likely look for other ways to differentiate their services and to keep up their profitability. One way of doing this is to go beyond the pure access model and to create services and features that provide a  context  to the songs in their catalog. The context may for instance enable music listeners a way to search and easily find the song they are looking for at a particular moment, it may allow users to share their music experiences with their friends, to organize their favorite music experiences in convenient ways, etc. Such context-based services provide a less deterministic and far more expansive space for innovation than those services that are based on a pure access model. While innovation within the access-model framework leads toward the same ultimate goal (universal access to all songs ever recorded), innovation within the context-model framework lacks such a knowable outcome. A provider of a context-based music service has a greater possibility to create a competitive advantage based on unique, innovative features than what is possible within the access-model framework.

Today the number of context-based services grows alongside access-based music services and most often a music service offers both access to music as well as a range of features that allow users to  do things  with music. The customer problem that needs to be solved is not that the customer needs access to music but rather how to navigate and  do things  with that music. In other words, customer value is increasingly created by providing the audience with tools that allow them to  do things  with music rather than by providing the audience with basic access to music. This shift from providing access to music to providing services and features that are based on the assumption that access to music is already provided is part of a similar general transformation of the music industry. The discussion has up until now been focused on the distribution of music, but the shift  from content to context  can be also observed in other segments of the music industry value chain.

A number of artists and composers have during recent years implemented the context-focused model in the creative production of their musical works. Rather than only making polished recordings for the audience to experience and enjoy, they have created services and practices that involve the audience in the creative process and allow the fans to  do things  with music. The British singer-songwriter Imogen Heap is one example of this trend. Heap actively encouraged her fans to upload sounds, images, and videos during the production of her latest album. She used this material in her work both as inspiration and as actual building blocks to her songs. As a consequence, Heap’s fans felt they were collaborating with their idol and were part of a communal, creative experience. Billy Bragg is also a singer-songwriter from Britain, but from a different generation and in a different genre than Heap. Bragg has also established a context-oriented experience for his fans, albeit perhaps primarily driven by his fans than by Bragg himself. Bragg reflects on his relationship with his fans and explains that he provides a “social framework” for his fans and that some of his fans don’t even like his music but they enjoy being part of a social community (Baym 2012).

Other musical artists and producers go way beyond the traditional format of the song and create mobile applications that allow the users to play with music in different ways. London-based RjDj and San Francisco-based Smule are two examples of organizations that have developed such applications that challenge the boundaries between music and interactive videogames. These tendencies raise fundamental questions about the definitions of the music industry and music organizations. Will tools and software for playing with music become recognized as a vital part of the music industry and a fourth core sector of the industry, next to live music, music licensing. and recorded music? If so, what will this mean for established music companies, artists, and composers? When live music and music publishing became increasingly important industry sectors in the first years of this millennium, traditional record labels reinvented themselves, built new capabilities that allowed them to serve as record labels, music publishers, management companies, live music companies, etc. They turned into  360-degree music companies , which placed equal emphasis on all three music industry segments. If context-based services and software will continue to grow in importance, music companies will need to add yet another new competency and perhaps new business areas to their organizations that will enable them to capture the increasing value created by context-based music services.

The Music Industrial Transformation Continues

The recorded music industry has been radically transformed during the past 15 years, but much remains before the industry takes the definitive step and leaves the physical world behind. This chapter has discussed some aspects of how this transformation continues, and how access-based music services play a substantial role in this process. The chapter has also touched upon how the recorded music becomes increasingly marginalized as a revenue source and how other industry segments such as live music and music licensing become increasingly significant. Finally, it has also presented how the audiences’ relationships with music change as a part of this transformation and how services and features that allow users to play  with  music rather than merely to play music move into center stage of the music industry in the digital age.

Amaral, Adriana, Simone Pereira de Sá, and Marjorie Kibby. “Friendship, Recommendation and Consumption on a Music-Based Social Network Site.” Presented at the AOIR Conference, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2009.

Baym, Nancy K. “Friends or Fans?: Seeing Social Media Audiences as Musicians Do.”  Participations  9, no. 2 (2012): 286–316.

Wikström, Patrik. The Music Industry: Music in the Cloud . 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013.

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Stereotyped, sexualized and shut out: The plight of women in music

The annual report from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative reveals that little has changed for women in music and explores why that might be the case.

2018 saw an outcry from artists, executives and other music industry professionals over the lack of women in music. Has 2019 brought change? A new report provides an update on the status of women making popular songs, and the barriers facing female songwriters and producers. 

The report, titled “Inclusion in the Recording Studio?” is the second annual report from Professor Stacy L. Smith and the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative to investigate the music industry. The study examines gender and race/ethnicity of artists and content creators across 700 popular songs on the Billboard Hot 100 year-end charts from 2012 to 2018. The report also evaluates gender for seven years of Grammy nominations for Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Producer of the Year, and Best New Artist. Finally, the investigation examines the barriers facing female songwriters and producers through a set of qualitative interviews.

Across all seven years examined, 21.7% of artists were female. After hitting a six-year low in 2017, little change was observed in the percentage of women working as artists in 2018 — 17% of artists in 2018 were women. From 2012 to 2018, women were most likely to appear on the charts as individual performers rather than in duos or in bands. 

In contrast to the findings on female performers, artists from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups represented half of 2019’s artists. Over time, people of color represent 44% of the over 1,400 artists included in the study. 

“Once again this year we see a lack of female voices in popular music,” Professor Smith said. “However, one positive finding is that of the female performers in 2018, 73% were women of color. This seven-year high point reveals that the music industry is including women of color in ways that other forms of entertainment are not.”

Female songwriters and producers are vastly outnumbered. Across seven years, 12.3% of songwriters of the songs were female. Of those women, 43.3% were women of color. The researchers also examined how many songs were completely missing a female writer — more than half (57%) of the 633 songs examined did not credit one woman as a songwriter.

Turning to producers, the percentage of women working in this role remained stagnant in 2018, and only 2% of producers across 400 songs were female. For producers, this translates into a gender ratio of 47 males to every one female. Only four women of color have worked as a producer on the 400 songs analyzed.

“Women are shut out of two crucial creative roles in the music industry,” Professor Smith said. “It was critical to understand what factors contribute to the lack of women songwriters and producers in order to open up more opportunities and create sustainable change.” 

Through interviews with 75 female songwriters and producers, the study explores the lived experiences of women in music. More than 40% stated that their work or skills were dismissed or discounted by colleagues, and 39% said that stereotyping and sexualization were impediments to their careers. Finally, more than one-third said that the industry was male-dominated — a belief borne out by the numbers in the quantitative report. Women also cited instances in which they had been doubted or questioned and illuminated how the recording studio is a site for objectification and place where personal safety is a concern.

“What the experiences of women reveal is that the biggest barrier they face is the way the music industry thinks about women,” Professor Smith said. “The perception of women is highly stereotypical, sexualized and without skill. Until those core beliefs are altered, women will continue to face a roadblock as they navigate their careers.”

The report also updates last year’s analysis of seven years of Grammy nominations in five categories. Roughly 10% of all nominees in these categories were female. For the first time in the seven-year sample, one woman has been nominated for Producer of the Year. Women were most likely to be nominated for Song of the Year or Best New Artist. Fewer than 10% of nominees for Record or Album of the Year were female. More than a third (37%) of the female Grammy nominees in the past seven years were women from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups. 

In addition to noting the barriers facing women in music, the study also offers solutions and highlights the work of different organizations to improve the numbers for women. For women creators, the work of She Is The Music , an organization dedicated to amplifying women’s voices is highlighted. She Is The Music runs songwriting camps and offers mentorship opportunities. For producers and engineers, Spotify’s EQL Studio Residency program , an opportunity that provides mentorship and work experience in three recording studios, is another way to improve the numbers. With the pipeline in mind, the report cites the need to highlight role models in music. The For The Record Collective is a call to action for inclusion that will feature a first-of-its-kind collection of EPs, docuseries and live events with music produced, written and engineered by women.

The report is the latest from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, and can be found online here . 

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How Will New Artists Learn to Navigate the Music Business?

Several platforms that allow artists to create and listen to music also see educational initiatives as a way to foster loyalty — and possibly make extra money

By Elias Leight

Elias Leight

Don Passman had been teaching a course on music law at USC for several years when he realized his class notes were the outline of a book. “Because musicians are oriented to their ears,” he says, there was an opportunity to write “an easy-to-read overview of the business for people who don’t like to read.” Think “big print, lots of pictures, analogies, simple language.” When the first edition of All You Need to Know About the Music Business came out in 1991 — the 11th edition arrived this past October — “there was only one book on the music business at the time that was of any consequence,” Passman recalls. “And it was a bit difficult to read.”

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Music attorney don passman on contracts, ai and what makes superstars different.

As a result, there is a dire need for quality, accessible music business education. Many of the platforms that allow artists to create, listen to, or distribute music today see educational initiatives as a way to foster loyalty and community — which will in turn help them stand out in the neverending battle for users and attention — and possibly as an additional revenue stream as well. 

Some of these educational efforts are in their early stages: Spotify started testing video learning courses in the U.K. in March, for example, while TIDAL has said education will be a cornerstone of its new era as it works to build financial tools for artists. (It was acquired by Block in 2021.)

The company Creative Intell is further along — it has raised money from around the music business and created an animated series to teach young artists the inner workings of the industry, from record deals to publishing. And the platform Bandlab, which allows its 100-million-plus users to create songs on their phones, has been releasing a steady stream of free tutorials and blog posts.

Helping aspiring artists grasp the intricacies of the music industry is “something that we’re investing a lot in,” says Kevin Breuner , Bandlab’s head of artist development and education. “The industry is more complex than ever, and understanding the business from day one is not just an advantage; it’s essential. Bandlab has such a young audience, it’s growing, and we want those artists to feel like they have a partner — somebody they can trust.”

Welcome to the Spotify Machine: Podcasts, Audiobooks, Video, Education — And, Yes, Music

Austen Smart agrees: The DJ, who co-founded the U.K. music-education company PLAYvirtuoso in 2020 with his brother, sees “huge potential in this space.” “I look at it like, there will be one in eight people, at least, learning at home,” he says, and a portion of those will be interested in the music industry. 

Creative Intell co-founder Steven Ship divides the music education field into three buckets — how to create music, how to market music and the business of music. While YouTube alone is littered with free videos on the first two topics — not to mention all the Reddit threads, blog posts and TikTok tutorials — finding reliable and accessible information on the third is more challenging. “The business of music is probably the most important; it has to be the most accurate, and it’s often ignored,” Ship says.  

If an aspiring artist produces a track poorly or markets it clumsily, that song probably won’t do well — a temporary setback. In contrast, if they don’t understand how the industry works, the consequences can be far more damaging: They could sign a contract with a manager, label, or publisher that cedes control of their output for decades. “Artists were horribly taken advantage of in the early days of the music business, because they just didn’t know what they were doing,” Passman says. And today, “the industry is changing so fast,” Breuner adds, making it even harder to “know what’s important and what’s not.”

When Smart signed a major label deal with his brother — just “two hungry young artists living in London” — he admits the pair “didn’t have the knowledge and the understanding of what we were ultimately signing.” An attorney would have helped, but they didn’t have the cash “to engage with lawyers who could help us interpret it.”

There’s a Free Mobile App Helping Teens Crash the Hot 100, and It’s Not TikTok

Contracts are often “murky and complicated,” Smart continues. “You get offered a relatively big advance; it’s quite a big number when you’re 25 and 22. What does it actually mean? What does it mean ten years later?” 

If he could rewind the clock, he imagines going through the process again — but this time, “we’ve got that course on understanding label deals” available. And if necessary, he could “book a one-on-one session with someone for 30 pounds” to help provide extra context. This is part of the reason that one of PLAYvirtuoso’s “three pillars” of educational material centers on understanding the music industry. 

PLAYvirtuoso is one of four companies that partnered with Spotify initially to provide courses on a variety of topics. The streaming service’s decision to test new education materials came about because it saw data indicating that some users were eager to acquire more knowledge. 

“If I take you 10 years back, most of the people that came to Spotify came with a single intent: listening to music,” says Mohit Jitani , a product director at Spotify. “But in the last few years, as we brought on podcasts and audiobooks, people started to come to Spotify to listen to an interview or learn leadership and finance.” 

TIDAL Plots a New Course — Will It Pay Off?

Currently Spotify’s courses are offered via a freemium model: Users are able to access the first few lessons for free, but they must pay to complete a full course. 

While Spotify’s exploratory foray into education stemmed from the fact that “people started coming to [us] for casual learning,” as Jitani puts it — and it potentially offers the platform another new revenue stream — TIDAL’s recent drive to help artists raise their business IQ is driven in part by its new owner, the payments company Block.

“Building tools and services for business owners, we saw that the moment that you get a little traction outside of your friends and family, the world becomes a lot more complicated,” says Agustina Sacerdote , the TIDAL’s global head of product. “You have to start to understand your numbers to understand where the next big opportunity is going to come from.”

The same principle applies to artists. Understandably, they tend to focus on the art. But as Ship notes, “The moment you release a song, you’re in business” — whether you like it or not. So TIDAL has started offering webinars and rolled out a new product called Circles, which Sacerdote likens to “a very curated version of Reddit, where we have the topics that we believe most artists have questions about,” including touring and merchandise. 

Why Spotify’s Latest Price Hike Means a Lower Royalty Rate for U.S. Songwriters

For now, TIDAL’s products are free. “Once an artist does get a really good piece of advice that they would have never gotten [elsewhere] on Circles, then we’ll start to think about, how do we monetize?” Sacerdote says. 

Creative Intell’s materials on the music business are currently far more comprehensive than TIDAL’s or Spotify’s: The company has created 18 animated courses to help aspiring artists — the vast majority of whom don’t have a manager or lawyer — “understand what they’re signing, learn how to monetize themselves better and learn how to protect themselves,” Ship says.  

Creative Intell releases some materials for free and charges for access to everything ($29.99 a month). It’s also aiming to work with distributors like Vydia as marketing partners. Vydia is not the only company looking to provide this type of resource — Songtrust, for example, has built out its own materials to help songwriters understand how to collect their money from around the world.

“Other industries have all kinds of corporate resources for training and the music industry is lacking those,” Ship says. “We’re trying to fill that void.”

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• Study finds shared acoustic relationships among the world’s languages and music

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Study finds shared acoustic relationships among the world’s languages and music

By BERT GAMBINI

Published May 17, 2024

A UB psychologist is part of a global research team that has identified specific acoustic relationships that distinguish speech, song and instrumental music across cultures.

The study published in the journal Science Advances , which involved experts in ethnomusicology, music psychology, linguistics and evolutionary biology, compared instrumental melodies along with songs, lyrics and speech in 55 languages. The findings provide an international perspective supporting ideas about how the world’s music and languages evolved into their current states.

“There are many ways to look at the acoustic features of singing versus speaking, but we found the same three significant features across all the cultures we examined that distinguish song from speech,” says Peter Pfordresher, professor of psychology, College of Arts and Sciences, and one of the 75 contributors to a unique project that involved the researchers assuming the dual roles of investigator and participant.

The three features are:

• Singing tends to be slower than speaking across all the cultures studied.
• People tend to produce more stable pitches when singing as opposed to speaking.
• Overall, singing pitch is higher than spoken pitch.

The exact evolutionary pressures responsible for shaping human behaviors are difficult to identify, but the new paper provides insights regarding the shared, cross-cultural similarities and differences in language and music — both of which are found in highly diverse forms across every human culture.

Pfordresher says the leading theory, advanced by the paper’s senior author, Patrick Savage, senior research fellow at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, is that music evolved to promote social bonding .

“When people make music, and this is the case around the world, they tend to do so collectively. They synchronize and harmonize with each other,” says Pfordresher. “The features we found that distinguish music from speech fit well with that theory.”

Think about tempo as a mechanism to encourage music’s social aspects. Being in sync becomes more difficult as tempo increases. When the tempo slows, the rhythm becomes predictable and easier to follow. Music becomes a more social enterprise.

It’s the same with pitch stability, according to Pfordresher.

“It’s much easier to match a stable pitch with someone else, to be in sync with the collective, than is the case when a pitch is wavering,” he says.

Similarly, it’s possible that the higher pitches found in singing happen as a byproduct of songs being produced at a slower rate.

“Slower production rates require a greater volume of air in the lungs,” explains Pfordresher. “Greater air pressure in the vocal system increases pitch.”

Conversational speech, in contrast, is not synchronized. Conversations generally alternate between people.

“I would speculate that conversational speech is faster than song because people want to hold on to the stage. They don’t want to provide false cues that they’ve finished, in essence handing the conversation off to another speaker,” says Pfordresher. “Pausing in a conversation or speaking slowly often indicates that it’s another person’s turn to speak.”

The study’s novel structure, with its investigators as participants, is part of the increasingly global nature of music cognition research. Savage and Yuto Ozaki, the lead author from Keio University in Japan, recruited researchers from Asia, Africa, the Americas, Europe and the Pacific, who spoke languages that included Yoruba, Mandarin, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Ukrainian, Russian, Balinese, Cherokee, Kannada, Spanish, Aynu, English and dozens more .

“First, we used this structure to counteract the unfortunate tradition of extractive research in cross-cultural musical studies in which researchers from the developed world collect, or extract, data from a culture in the developing world, and use the data to promote their own success,” says Pfordresher.

The second reason has more to do with the validity of the data.

“Our analyses require annotation of syllable and note onsets in songs and speech from around the world,” Pfordresher says. “No single investigator knows all of these languages. By having each investigator participate and thus check their own annotations, we add additional validity to our study.”

Each investigator-participant chose a song of national significance from their culture. Pfordresher selected “America the Beautiful.” Savage chose “Scarborough Fair.” Ozaki sang the Japanese folk song “Ōmori Jinku.”

Participants sang the song first, performed an instrumental version next on an instrument of their choice and then recited the lyrics. They also provided an explanation for their choice as a free-form speech condition of the study. All four conditions were recorded and then segmented.

To avoid the possibility of bias creeping into the data, Pfordresher explains that not all investigators were involved in generating the study’s initial set of hypotheses. All of the authors looked at the data but did so to make sure there were no differences between the initial group and those others.

“We do hope to follow up this study with other research that has authors from around the world sample data from within their cultures,” says Pfordresher.

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Steve Albini, Studio Master of ’90s Rock and Beyond, Dies at 61

A musician and audio engineer, he helped define the sound of alternative rock while becoming an outspoken critic of the music industry.

By Ben Sisario

Steve Albini, a rock musician and revered studio engineer who played a singular role in the development of the sound of alternative music in the 1980s, ’90s and beyond — recording acclaimed albums by Nirvana, PJ Harvey and Pixies, along with hundreds of others — while becoming an outspoken critic of the music industry, died on Tuesday at his home in Chicago. He was 61.

The cause was a heart attack, said Taylor Hales of Electrical Audio, the Chicago studio that Mr. Albini founded in 1997.

With a sharp vision for how a band should be recorded — as raw as possible — and an even sharper tongue for anything he deemed mediocre or compromised, Mr. Albini was a visionary in the studio and one of rock’s most acerbic wits.

On his own, he led the bands Big Black and Shellac, both of which venerated loud, abrasive guitars and snarling vocals. In those groups, and in virtually every project he worked on, Mr. Albini clung to punk’s defiant do-it-yourself ethic with an almost religious tenacity.

He also long maintained an impish zeal to provoke and offend. Big Black’s last, most acclaimed album, from 1987, has a typically unprintable title, and he once dismissed Nirvana — the group that later hired him to record the album “In Utero” (1993), at the peak of their fame — as nothing but “R.E.M. with a fuzzbox.”

A withering and prolific critic of the music business’s exploitive extremes, Mr. Albini wrote a widely quoted 1993 article, “ The Problem With Music ,” describing in clinical detail how naïve bands are lured into major-label deals that, in most cases, leave them broke and in debt.

In that article, which was published in The Baffler, Mr. Albini laid out a hypothetical ledger for a rock group that had signed a $250,000 record deal, but whose work, according to his math, netted the label $710,000 and the producer $90,000 — and just $4,031.25 for each member.

“The band members have each earned about ⅓ as much as they would working at a 7-Eleven,” Mr. Albini wrote, “but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month.”

However, in the 1990s, when his work as a recording engineer — he scoffed at being called a producer, thinking that term implied control over an artist’s work — was in highest demand, Mr. Albini made no apology for accepting big checks for recording major-label acts.

His recording approach, for underground bands like the Jesus Lizard and Slint, captured their muscular power with clarity, and brought out a drum sound you could feel in your gut.

Those bands also worked with Mr. Albini at their own risk; in those days, he was known for ridiculing the bands he recorded after the fact.

“Never have I seen four cows more anxious to be led around by their nose rings,” he wrote after recording “Surfer Rosa,” the seminal 1988 album by the Boston-based quartet Pixies, which became one of the defining classics of 1980s alt-rock. (Even so, Mr. Albini remained a close friend of Kim Deal, the bassist in that band, and recorded her other project, the Breeders.)

But to those who followed Mr. Albini closely, he was far more than a two-dimensional character. He became a champion poker player — winning more than $196,000 at the World Series of Poker in 2022 — and embraced social media, answering questions at great length and often with eye-opening honesty.

In recent years he also surprised many of his followers and detractors alike by revisiting his often-obnoxious past persona with a sense of contrition.

“A lot of things I said and did from an ignorant position of comfort and privilege are clearly awful and I regret them,” he wrote on Twitter , the platform now called X, in 2021.

Steve Albini was born in Pasadena, Calif., on July 22, 1962, and grew up in Missoula, Mont., where his father, Frank, worked as a wildfire research scientist.

He has described his young life in Montana as unremarkable until, as a teenager, he heard the Ramones’ first album, a blueprint of punk rock that was released in 1976. Its aggression, simplicity and puerile sense of humor opened up a new world for him.

“It was the first time I felt like there was any part of culture that represented the irreverence and goofiness and kind of mania that my friends and I were displaying,” Mr. Albini told The Guardian in an interview last year.

He enrolled at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., near Chicago, and began to develop his approach as a provocateur and a self-reliant musician. As an art project, he once stood behind a pane of plexiglass and taunted the audience to throw whatever they wanted at the barrier.

While at Northwestern, he recorded the first Big Black EP, “Lungs” (1982), almost entirely by himself on a borrowed reel-to-reel tape machine. It had cold, echoey, synthetic rhythms, and it sketched out a dark, nihilistic worldview in its opening lines: “The only good policeman is a dead one/The only good laws aren’t enforced.”

Big Black soon became a full band — though it continued to use drum machines — and the group’s output came to define a particularly raw form of the post-punk vanguard. At its best, on songs like “Kerosene” and “Jordan, Minnesota,” the band presented a nightmarish view of America, populated by arsonists, killers and child abusers, set to an impossibly intense, screeching soundtrack.

At the same time, Mr. Albini made a name for himself as a splenetic commentator on music. His written work, published in various fanzines, could seem like a form of insult comedy. He dismissed the Replacements’ beloved 1984 album, “Let It Be,” for example, as “a sad, pathetic end to a long downhill slide.”

In the late 1980s, he reached perhaps the height of his provocation with a new band he called Rapeman; the name, he said, was borrowed from a Japanese comic book, though he never denied it was meant to goad the audience. At some shows, the band faced protests. “The really annoying thing,” he once said, “was that the majority of the people on the picket line were precisely the kind of people that we would have liked at the gig.”

After making “Surfer Rosa,” which brought Pixies to wide attention, Mr. Albini became an in-demand producer for underground acts like Boss Hog, Superchunk and Urge Overkill. He recorded PJ Harvey’s “Rid of Me” (1993) with serrated guitars and — unorthodox for a major album — vocals set notably low in the mix.

He was soon courted by Nirvana for its follow-up to “Nevermind,” the album that became a global smash and ignited a revolution in the music business. Before agreeing to work with the group, he sent its three members a letter giving advice and laying out his terms.

“Bang out a record in a couple of days, with high quality but minimal ‘production,’” he wrote, “and no interference from the front office bulletheads.” He also told them, “I would like to be paid like a plumber” — meaning that he wanted a flat fee and not “points,” or a percentage of sales, a common practice among top record producers that Mr. Albini disdained as unethical.

But when the album was completed, the band’s record label, DGC, pushed for changes, and several of its tracks were remixed by Scott Litt, who had worked with R.E.M. “They waged a publicity campaign to try to shame the band into doing the record again,” Mr. Albini once told Tape Op , a magazine about audio recording.

He said his reputation had been damaged by the incident, though it was resuscitated when Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin recruited him for their 1998 album, “Walking Into Clarksdale.”

Since then, he had continued to work as an engineer and producer for countless bands, often at Electrical Audio, his studio; in a 2018 interview , he estimated that he had recorded “probably a couple thousand” albums to that point. Among the most acclaimed of them are records by Joanna Newsom, Nina Nastasia, Neurosis and Will Oldham.

His survivors include his wife, the filmmaker Heather Whinna, and his mother, Gina. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

When asked by The Guardian last year how he would like his career to be seen if he were to retire then, Mr. Albini answered: “I’m doing it, and that’s what matters to me — the fact that I get to keep doing it. That’s the whole basis of it. I was doing it yesterday, and I’m gonna do it tomorrow, and I’m gonna carry on doing it.”

He added, with an expletive, that he didn’t care.

Ben Sisario covers the music industry. He has been writing for The Times since 1998. More about Ben Sisario

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• Music industry revenue distribution worldwide 2023, by source

In 2023, streaming accounted for 67.3 percent of total global recorded music revenue, of which 48.9 percent was attributed to subscription audio streams and 18.5 percent to ad-supported streams. Meanwhile, the physical music segment's contribution to the total figure of 28.6 billion U.S. dollars stood at 17.8 percent, and performance rights at 9.5 percent.

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Does Copyright Imitation Impact Purchase Behaviour in the Entertainment Industry: A PLS-SEM Analysis of Gen Z’s Brand Recognition in Africa?

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The entertainment industry has experienced remarkable growth, driven by technological advancements and changing consumer preferences, with revenue soaring to $31.23 billion in 2023 and anticipated growth at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 10.64% through 2027. However, the industry’s significant sustainability issue is the widespread practice of copyright imitation, with Africa’s accommodated 2.5 billion unauthorised image imitations daily representing 1.48% global imitation index, causing substantial damages, notably affecting Gen Z with estimated losses of €532.5 billion, with Egypt experiencing the highest incidence of cases in Africa. This research delves into how copyright infringement impacts brand recognition, as a construct of purchase behaviour, among Gen Z in the African entertainment industry. By relying on post-positivism paradigm and planned behaviour theory, the research used questionnaire and collected 352 responses (92% sample rate) from tech-savvy Gen Z respondents, derived using Borden sampling model. The PLS-SEM (Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling) model reveals that copyright infringement substantially affects brand recognition, explaining 64.7% of the variance in consumer behaviour. Specifically, imitated corporate names, product ideas, and promotional tactics impact brand recognition by 11.1%, 9%, and 6.2% respectively, which refutes the initial assumption. Research recommendations include implementing stricter management protocols within the industry, fostering deeper community engagement, and differentiating products by using unique, high-quality materials. The study acknowledges potential biases in data collection due to unequal online access among Gen Z music enthusiasts in Africa, by possibly not fully reflecting the broader diversity of Gen Z behaviour across the continent in the world, considering the varying cultural, economic, and social dynamics that influence purchasing behaviours. 

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Apple Music celebrates the greatest records ever made with the launch of inaugural 100 Best Albums list

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May 13, 2024

PRESS RELEASE

A 10-day countdown kicks off today with the reveal of albums 100-91, featuring works from Solange; Tyler, The Creator; George Michael; and more Discover, share, and follow along as Apple Music journeys through the albums that shaped, inspired, and fundamentally changed music

CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA  Apple Music today announced the release of its 100 Best Albums of all time, a celebratory list of the greatest records ever made, crafted by Apple Music’s team of experts alongside a select group of artists, including Maren Morris, Pharrell Williams, J Balvin, Charli XCX, Mark Hoppus, Honey Dijon, and Nia Archives, as well as songwriters, producers, and industry professionals. The list is an editorial statement, fully independent of any streaming numbers on Apple Music — a love letter to the records that have shaped the world music lovers live and listen in.

Apple Music is bringing its 100 Best Albums to life with a countdown celebration beginning today, revealing 10 albums each day for the next 10 days, along with a brand-new 100 Best microsite, new and exclusive content, dedicated Apple Music Radio episodes, and so much more. The countdown will culminate on the final day with the reveal of Apple Music’s top 10 albums of all time during a broadcast radio special.

“100 Best brings together all the things that make Apple Music the ultimate service for music lovers — human curation at its peak, an appreciation for the art of storytelling, and unparalleled knowledge of music and an even deeper love for it,” said Rachel Newman, Apple Music’s senior director of content and editorial. “We have been working on this for a very long time, and it’s something we are all incredibly proud of and excited to share with the world.”

“Putting this list together was a true labor of love, both in that it was incredibly difficult to do and in that we are all so passionate about it,” said Zane Lowe, Apple Music’s global creative director and lead anchor for Apple Music 1. “We were tasked with selecting the 100 best — that’s practically mission impossible. But as music fans, it was also amazing to really take a minute and sit and think about the music and albums and artists that we love so much in this context. If this list sparks more debate among fans outside of Apple Music and gets people talking passionately about the music they love, then we’ve done what we set out to do.”

The first 10 albums, revealed today, offer a glimpse into Apple Music’s unique approach with 100 Best. With seven of the 10 records hailing from the 21st century, two from the 90s, only one from the 70s, and various genres represented, the list spotlights contemporary artists like Tyler, The Creator; Robyn; Lorde; Travis Scott; Solange; Burial; and more who have helped define this century through their music and its influence on others.

100. Body Talk , Robyn 99. Hotel California, Eagles 98. ASTROWORLD, Travis Scott 97. Rage Against the Machine , Rage Against the Machine 96. Pure Heroine , Lorde 95 . Confessions , USHER 94. Untrue , Burial 93. A Seat at the Table , Solange 92. Flower Boy , Tyler, The Creator 91. Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 , George Michael

“There are so many fun facts for our listeners to discover about these albums,” said Scott Plagenhoef, Apple Music’s global head of music programming. “For example, two of the records revealed today were promoted without the image of the artist, but for opposite reasons — Burial’s Untrue because the artist was still operating anonymously at the time, and George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 because the artist was actually retreating from fame.”

To accompany the list, today Apple Music also revealed a dedicated microsite that will update every day of the countdown, making it easy for listeners to follow along. Available now at 100best.music.apple.com , the new 100 Best microsite spotlights in-depth analysis of each album, archival interviews, and more, and makes it easy for fans to share their favorite albums with friends and on their social channels.

Explore records 100-91 of Apple Music’s 100 Best Albums at 100best.music.apple.com .

Fans will also be treated to a full 100 Best Albums Radio takeover on Apple Music Hits, where round-the-clock specials with Apple Music Radio hosts and daily specials at 9 a.m. PT (noon ET) will be broadcasted, plus exclusive content will drop every day on demand on Apple Music and Apple Podcasts.

The last 10 albums will be revealed on Wednesday, May 22, with a special roundtable discussion broadcasting globally on Apple Music that features guest artists Nile Rodgers and Maggie Rogers reflecting on the list alongside Apple Music’s own Zane Lowe and Ebro Darden. Lowe will also curate a special mashup-style DJ mix featuring songs from all 100 Best Albums.

Apple Music will keep the momentum going after the countdown ends with an additional week of 100 Best Albums Radio takeover on Apple Music Hits.

All 100 Best Albums recipients will be given an award comprised of blasted anodized aluminum, sourced entirely from recycled Apple products, in a unique polished PVD gold. The design on the back of the award takes its cues from a vinyl LP record and is inscribed with the artist’s name, the album title, and the album’s year of release.

Explore Apple Music’s 100 Best Albums at 100best.music.apple.com and check back daily to discover the full list. Get exclusive content by following @AppleMusic on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and X.

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