ABSTRACT
The music industry was in crisis, which, like all crises in the music industry, meant that nobody knew where the market was going or what its audiences wanted. But this crisis was like no other. The global downturn of CD sales during the late 1990s and early millennium years was exacerbated by the threat posed to the music industry by file sharing on the web. Increasingly, music files were being freely swapped by enthusiastic listeners through computer programs like Napster, Kazaa, iMesh, Gorkster, and Morpheus. From the 1990s Hollywood had begun discreetly signifying on jazz as sophisticated and chic, the ultimate urban attitude, in its human interest dramas aimed at the over thirties, which is to say non-blockbuster movies. As the jazzy singers blossomed into a key area of record company activity, Glen Barros, president of Concord records told Jazz Times that, 'Naturally the industry is going to devote more resources to that which is working'.
