The Music Industry

within the music industry, it is divided into two sides;

• The mainstream
• and the independent

The mainstream side is basically huge companies such as Sony, who have artists such as Amanda Seyfried, Boys like Girls, ADELE, Chris Brown on their label so there are obviously a wide variety in music but mainly A LOT of artists signed to them.

Not only are there mainstream labels but there are Independent labels. These tend to be the more unknown labels which are small organisations which operate independently to major labels. These labels mainly have artists with a niche genre.

There used to be a lot of mainstream labels but over the years this decreased as you will see below.

So here is 'timeline' of how many labels were mainstream over the years;

• 1970's - 1990's = 6 Major Labels
• Late 90's = 5 Major labels (the big five)
• 2004 = the big 4 major labels.
• 2012 - The big 3. 

And here is how the sales dropped over the years;

• 2008-2010 = sales for albums dropped over £100million
• 2008 = £428m
• 2009 = £366m

so as you can see from all of these figures, as the companies lost money, the smaller industries started going out of business and therefore most artist signed with more of the major labels. Resulting in there now only being 3 Major labels. These three are : Sony, Warner and Universal.

The current trends of the music industry is things like mp3 and iTunes. And only 13% of the downloads we make are legal. There are over 67 illegal download services in the UK alone. The legal downloads that are being made however can be controlled by the label and obviously that 13% are helping the labels stay in business.

Not only is it downloading which is the current trend, people are using social networking sites and streaming websites to get their music.