ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the music business in Europe, the United States, and East Asia in terms of a field of cultural production in which technological innovations have led to structural adjustments of one sort or another among the different players in the field. ‘Music’ referred to the performance and public consumption of musical compositions in a variety of locations, including bars, clubs, concerts, dance halls, radio and television programmes; ‘recording’ to the manufacture and distribution of records, tapes, and compact discs. At the heart of all the activity that goes on in the production of pop music is a single goal: popular, and thus financial, success. The field of music is marked by a close proximity between production and consumption. The first significant impact on the industry’s structure came with the advent of magnetic tape recording in 1950. Compact discs, introduced to consumers in the 1980s, were the first element in the recording industry’s shift to digital technology.
