Music’s many sub-industries now function as one market dominated by financiers

Evidence

Beyond commodification and monopolization, we are now faced with financialization and assetization. In another interview I conducted with an executive at one of the Big 3 record labels (again under condition of anonymity), he claimed that his company “does not hold any market power.” His explanation was that Spotify controls streaming, iTunes controls downloads, iHeartMedia controls terrestrial radio, Pandora controls digital radio, and Live Nation controls concerts. Despite describing obvious examples of market power, there is some truth to his comment if one broadly conceives of one single music market, rather than many separate music industries, such as recording, publishing, licensing, live, retail, promotion, management, instrument manufacturing and sales, education, and so on. This consideration of a single market would go against much scholarship in popular music studies, as discussed earlier, but a single market is how the most powerful executives and financiers conceive of their business. Jonathan Sterne may be right to proclaim “there is no ‘music industry,’” but not because there are “only many industries with many relationships to music.” Maybe there is no music industry because there’s just a hedge fund. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 237

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s Part One/Part Two question: does financial ownership redefine industry boundaries before it touches artistic form? This partitioning of the market is the precondition for catalog acquisition.