ABSTRACT
The music business once had many full service major labels. The labels weren’t competing with fi le sharing; vinyl to CD conversion kept catalogue recordings vibrant and productive; dozens of electronics and media stores were thriving selling music, books, and video products. And then the Internet matured, and with that maturity came the realization of how really immature the music business was. It was unable to fend off theft of its intellectual property, it clung to its decades-old business model, it lost valuable time trying to deny that the digital age had anything to do with music, and then it watched as the sale of recorded music withered. It took the music business longer than many had thought it would, but it succeeded in embracing the new environment for recorded music. Among the biggest changes was the reduction of major record labels from a dozen to three. Labels were consolidated for the effi ciency it created. Effi ciency in this instance meant abolishing redundant employee positions and eliminating non-essential services from
the company; in other words, “let’s fi re some people we don’t need and let’s stop spending so much money on things we don’t think are important.”
