Centralization of Music Industry: The War on Choice
Today, five major record labels sell 80% of the music in the entire world. These companies are BMG, Sony Music, AOL/Time Warner, Vivendi Universal, and EMI. Each of these companies has purchased many smaller labels on its way to a major share in what is fast becoming the monopoly of the music business. MCA Records, which gave us such names as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Lynyrd Skynyrd, is now a small part of the French record giant, Vivendi. Vivendi also owns Mercury Nashville and Universal Records. Former giant Capitol Records, the label which gave us The Beatles and The Beach Boys, is now controlled, alongside several others, by EMI.
In the past, DJs selected the music that they played over the air. Currently, every DJ is given a playlist. Certain songs must be played every hour, and others, every half hour.
So what does this mean for the average consumer of popular music? As is typically the case with monopolies, prices have increased and variety, arguably as well as quality of product, has gone down. Artists with talent, such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, have been replaced on the “main stage,” by sensational, fly-by-night one-hit wonders such as Britney Spears, Ricky Martin, N’Sync, and The Backstreet Boys. Music with substance has been replaced with the pop-star image. The conglomerates are less concerned with developing lasting talent, and instead concerned with furthering a “get rich quick” formula. The result, in my honest opinion, is a decline in the quality and substance of the music.
Countering this centralization and subsequent decline in quality is the emergence in recent years of the internet as a medium for music. The record companies, as of now, do not own the internet, and the price for a band to create its own website is relatively small, compared to the costs of getting radio stations to play the music. Artists and bands such as Blackberry Smoke, Poker Face, Aimee Allen, and Cross Canadian Ragweed, now have an avenue to advertise their music to the consumers.
