Week one - Part A

This week's blog will cover chapters 1 and two in The Future of Music Business by Steve Gordon as well as a review of a website. Part A will cover Chapter 1 and Part B will cover chapter two and the website review.

While I was skimming the introduction of the book, there was a paragraph that talked about the suffering of the major labels and how they had all steadily lost profits since 1999. This got me thinking if this will happen to major publishing companies in terms of books in the future when a good majority of the population have ereaders such as Kindle or the Nook. I'm not convinced it will for several reasons. One, not everybody will be able to afford ereaders (or even iPads) right now. Maybe in the really distant future when they're much cheaper but at this point, no. Plus not everybody, even today has the needed access to computers. Don't get me wrong, I love my NookColor (though I didn't buy it to read ebooks, I bought it so I could read my image pdfs on it from SJSU) but I still love holding a book and, call me crazy, I love the smell of new books. So while the recording industry may be suffering, I don't think the publishing world (in terms of books) will go the same way.

Reading through chapter one which focuses on the basics of music laws and business, I noticed an error and it is not just a little grammatical or spelling error either. It is a big, does not know what he is talking about, error. He writes "the producer of a dramatic work (opera, musical comedy, or ballet) must negotiate such rights directly with the publisher or composer" (pp 9). This is not true. Take for example, the musical Cats written by Trevor Nunn and composted by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber and based on a poem by T.S. Elliot. To perform Cats in public you wouldn't contact Sir Andrew or the company that originally published it, no, you would contact Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization to have the performance rights.

Sources: http://www.musicals101.com/alphinde.htm
            http://www.rnh.com/show_synopsis.asp?id=CS3&s=1
            http://www.rnh.com/show_license_1.asp

Another thing that I thought of while reading this chapter is that every artist, no matter how big or how small, should really be reading this to understand what is going on not only with their contracts (if they have them) but with the songs that they sing and/or record.

Lastly, it was nice to read how exactly the courts have determined "fair use". I also didn't know that "radio broadcasters have to pay songwriters and publishers for the songs they play but they do not have to pay artists and labels to play the very same songs" (Gordon, 2008, pp. 19). This doesn't seem fair and I can truly understand why the recording industry wants to change it.