In July 2021, the fully updated 2nd edition of “The Economics of Music” has been published by Agenda Publishing, which was reviewed by the eminent cultural economist David Throsby in the TIMES Literary Supplement: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-music-business/ Promotional text: The music industry is one of the most dynamic business sectors. It has had to evolve and…

My new book “The Economics of Music” is now avaiable in the bookstores. “The Economics of the Music” is a concise, scientifically grounded textbook on the economic fundamentals of the music industry in particular and the music economy in general. It aims to highlight the economic principles that govern the music business by analysing music…

Geoff Luck of the Finnish Centre for Interdisciplinary Music Research at University of Jyväskylä recently published his new book “The Experience Factor” (see https://www.theexperiencefactor.net/). From Adele to Zeppelin, every great song has an irresistible quality that keeps us coming back for more. But what exactly is it? And, more importantly, can it be quantified? The…

Jim Rogers’ PhD-thesis at Dublin City University was recently published under the title “The Death & Life of the Music Industry in the Digital Age” at Bloomsbury/London. He interviewed 30 music business professionals in the UK and Ireland from 2007 to 2010 to answer the main research question if the Internet caused a crisis in…

“Download! How the Internet Transformed the Record Business” by music industry journalist Phil Hardy is a detailed analysis how the majors record companies lost control of the value added chain in the music industry in the digital revolution. He tells the story about self-confident and maybe arrogant music business executives, who had profited from the…

“Music Business and the Experience Economy” is the first book on the music business in Australasia from an academic perspective. In a cross-disciplinary approach, the authors deal with a wide-range of topics concerning the production, distribution and consumption in the digital age. The interrelationship of legal, aesthetic and economic aspects in the production of music…

It is unusual to make a review of a book’s second edition. However, when “Creativity and Innovation in the Music Industry” was published in 2006 the outcome of the great transformation process of the music industry was anything than clear. Therefore, it was a great opportunity to revisit the developments in the music industry in…

“Ticket Masters. The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped” by Dean Budnick and Josh Baron is one the first books that highlight the emergence of the modern concert industry by telling the story of the rise of its main players: Ticketmaster and Live Nation. It gives a deep insight into…

“Ticket Masters. The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped” by Dean Budnick and Josh Baron is one the first books that highlight the emergence of the modern concert industry by telling the story of the rise of its main players: Ticketmaster and Live Nation. It gives a deep insight into…

“Ticket Masters. The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped” by Dean Budnick and Josh Baron is one the first books that highlight the emergence of the modern concert industry by telling the story of the rise of its main players: Ticketmaster and Live Nation. It gives a deep insight into…

“Ticket Masters. The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped” by Dean Budnick and Josh Baron is one the first books that highlight the emergence of the modern concert industry by telling the story of the rise of its main players: Ticketmaster and Live Nation. It gives a deep insight into…

“Ticket Masters. The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped” by Dean Budnick and Josh Baron is one the first books that highlight the emergence of the modern concert industry by telling the story of the rise of its main players: Ticketmaster and Live Nation. It gives a deep insight into…

“Ticket Masters. The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped” by Dean Budnick and Josh Baron is one of the first books that highlight the emergence of the modern concert industry by telling the story of the rise of its main players: Ticketmaster and Live Nation. It gives a deep insight…

For several years the Australian music industry was dominated by a few players who enjoyed a more or less monopolistic position. In the infant period of the industry Edison Co. dominated the record business with its cylinders and from 1931 on EMI had the monopoly of record distribution in Australia, which was not challenged until…

When acoustic recording was replaced by the superior technology of electrical recording, the record companies around the world had more or less unsaleable mechanical recordings in stock. It was estimated that alone in the U.S. approximately two hundred million acoustic discs were on the market. To get rid of the obsolete recordings the record companies…

The main competitors on the world record market, The Gramophone Company and the Columbia Graphophone Company, originally hesitated to enter the Australian market and it took several years before they etablished record pressing plants in Australia. Whereas the Columbia Graphophone also ran a recording studio from the beginning, the Gramophone Company could not bring itself…

Not only efforts to establish a genuine Australian music industry failed, but also foreign record companies were faced by severe financial problems after initial economic success. Especially “medium-majors” such as the Brunswick-Balke-Collender and Vocalion did not have sufficient financial resources to establish themselves on the Australian music market in the long run. They became also…

Before Ross Laird further highlights the efforts to lay the ground for an Australian music industry, he outlines the general atmosphere, in which music was produced and distributed in the first half of the 1920s. On the basis of extended citations of newspaper articles and internal company’s reports the author highlights the negative attitude of…

„Sound Beginnings. The early record industry in Australia” by Ross Laird seems to be the first and only book on the early Australian music industry. Laird did not only tell the story of technological progress in phonographic industry, but highlights the history of the main players of the Australian music business in great detail from…