ABSTRACT
It is a bit of a mystery to us why there is currently no book available that deals with the music industry as a global phenomenon. There are several dozen books about the American music industry and a half dozen on the music business in England, and a recent volume deals with the Australian music business. The groundbreaking book Big Sounds from Little People: The Music Business in the Third World by Krister Malm and Ralph Wallis deals with the music industry in the third world. The book is now twenty years old, and no one has followed up this work, other than the same authors, who published a much less ambitious volume several years later. There are a dozen or so generally academic books that discuss the relationship between music and politics. Many of these books are fascinating, dealing with such matters as the underground transmission of rock and roll in communist countries, but they seldom are very specific about the business aspects of the industry.
