Music Business
The money. Labels and A&R, contracts and recoupment, publishing and mechanicals, managers, catalogue sales, ticketing and the Live Nation question, and the artists who found out how their deal actually worked.
Part of Pop
43 moments in this segment.
- - Colonel Tom Parker interviewed on ABC Nightline, 1987. Rare on-camera interview with Elvis's manager, originally broadcast 15 August 1987.
- - The A&R Process Explained. BBC Introducing Musicians' Masterclass panel hosted by Mary Anne Hobbs on how A&R works and why a record deal is not the endpoint artists assume.
- - Who Made Pop Music So Repetitive? You Did. The Atlantic on labels using Spotify and Shazam data to predict hits, and the argument that listener preference drives chart homogeneity.
- - Emerson Lake & Palmer - LP with Manticore. LP label of a German edition of "Emerson, Lake and Palmer - Pictures at an Exhibition" with Manticore picture Photographed/dated 2016.
- - Parental angolano. /scan dated 2016.
- - The anatomy of a song: verse, chorus, function. 12tone examines pop song form not as labels but as function, asking why verse-chorus structure persists.
- - The Boy Band Con: the Lou Pearlman story. Documentary trailer tracing how Pearlman manufactured the late-1990s boy-band format and defrauded the acts he created.
- - Life as a Foreign K-Pop Trainee. CNA Insider follows a Japanese trainee inside the Korean idol academy system, showing the audition, training and contract pipeline that precedes debut.
- - Hitsville: the making of Motown. Trailer for the documentary built on unearthed Motown archive footage about Berry Gordy's hit factory.
- - Japan's Idols: Devoted Fans and Big Money. FRANCE 24 reports on the economics of the Japanese idol business and the older male fanbase that sustains it.
- - Looking for Fame in Nigeria's Music Industry. DW report on young Nigerians entering the music business as an employment route in the wake of Wizkid and Burna Boy's international success.
- - How Major Labels Discover Artists. Warner Music head of A&R Joe Kentish explains how labels scout, evaluate and sign artists, and what a record deal actually commits both sides to.
- - How PC Music defined a new kind of pop. ARTE TRACKS interviews A. G. Cook, SOPHIE and Charli XCX on the hyper-processed, synthetic production aesthetic they built around the PC Music label.
- - Lives of Idols: The K-Pop Trainee System. Documentary on the Korean trainee pipeline with Super Junior, Wonder Girls and others describing the years of training that precede a debut.
- - Why Taylor Swift re-recorded her first six albums. Billboard explains the ownership dispute that led an artist to re-record her own catalogue to devalue the originals.
- - Brill Building Dec 2021 07. The Brill Building in Manhattan, New York, seen in December 2021. Photographed/dated 2021.
- - Brill Building Dec 2021 14. The Brill Building in Manhattan, New York, seen in December 2021. Photographed/dated 2021.
- - Brill Building Dec 2021 21. The Brill Building in Manhattan, New York, seen in December 2021. Photographed/dated 2021.
- - Colonel Tom Parker and the management of Elvis Presley. Feature documentary on the most consequential and most contested manager relationship in pop.
- - What a record label actually does. Billboard explains label functions from A&R and marketing to distribution, and what being signed means now.
- - Virtual avatars and the K-pop industry. BBC World Service on Korean agencies building lifelike digital idols, and what happens to performers when the star can be synthetic.
- - The economics of Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. PBS NewsHour on how the Eras Tour's 2023 US leg moved measurable amounts of money through host cities, and what that says about the stadium-tour economy.
- - Are bots buying up your concert tickets?. CNA Insider investigates automated ticket-buying and the resale market that puts face-value seats out of reach of fans.
- - Every type of song structure explained. David Bennett works through verse, chorus, pre-chorus, bridge and middle eight, and what the labels actually describe.
- - Inside the K-pop dream factory. Channel 4's Unreported World follows teenage trainees in Seoul's performing-arts academies, in an industry worth $8bn where about 1% make it.
- - How Concert Tickets Stopped Being Cheap. More Perfect Union traces live-music pricing from 1950s ticket stubs to the Live Nation-Ticketmaster era of fees and dynamic pricing.
- - Sony Music's Rob Stringer on the state of the industry. The chairman of Sony Music Group interviewed by Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw at Screentime in Los Angeles, October 2024, on where the major-label business stands.
- - The new Latin music business. Billboard Latin Music Week 2024 panel with Rancho Humilde's Jimmy Humilde and label executives on how Latin deals are now structured.
- - Tin Pan Alley and the birth of the popular song. Lucasfilm documentary on how new demand for entertainment created the industrialised songwriting trade of Tin Pan Alley.
- - Quincy Jones on Getting Started in Music. PBS American Masters interview footage recorded in 2001 in which Jones describes his path from arranger to the era's most powerful pop producer.
- - Superfans, the music industry's new goldmine. A KindredCast discussion of superfan monetisation, sizing the opportunity at roughly $4.5bn and forecasting $3.3bn of additional music revenue by 2030.
- - The Brill Building: Pop's First Hit Factory. David Bennett on the New York office block where staff songwriters produced the bulk of early-1960s American pop hits under a publisher-driven system.
- - Bogato Records jpg. The official logo of the music label Bogato Records Photographed/dated 2025.
- - How Live Nation came to dominate live music. WSJ on the $23bn company that owns Ticketmaster, roughly 390 venues and controlling stakes in major festivals.
- - Inside the World's Largest Songwriting Camp. Danny Ross, founder of Anti Social Camp and a Berklee NYC professor, explains how large-scale songwriting camps are organised and how credits and placements come out of them.
- - Building an Afrobeats Career: Tems' Manager. Donawon describes the management and release systems he built around Tems, and how the Nigerian industry differs from Anglo label structures.
- - What Taylor Swift buying back her masters changed. Variety's music editor tells CBS Mornings how Swift's May 2025 repurchase of her first six albums reshaped how artists and fans think about ownership.
- - Tin Pan Alley Aug 2025 12. Tin Pan Alley in Manhattan, New York, seen in August 2025 Photographed/dated 2025.
- - Tin Pan Alley Aug 2025 01. Tin Pan Alley in Manhattan, New York, seen in August 2025 Photographed/dated 2025.
- - Why going to concerts is harder than ever. Business Insider traces the rise in ticket prices from about $5 for the Beatles to a $136 US average in 2024, and the resale market that roughly doubles it.
- - Audu Maikori on Who Owns Afrobeats. The founder of Chocolate City, Nigeria's longest-surviving record label, on label structure, intellectual property and the platform economics behind afrobeats.
- - Vinyl passes $1bn and overtakes the CD. Report on vinyl surpassing $1 billion in 2025 US sales and outselling CDs for the first time in decades.
- - Japan's Idol Industry Sells Access, Not Music. Economic breakdown of the Japanese idol business, showing how records lose money while handshake events, merchandise and voting drive the revenue.
