Jim Duff Music Blog

Growing up in Kentucky, Jim Duff counted the legends of traditional Country music as his heroes. Artists like Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Townes Van Zandt made a huge impact on the young songwriter and helped shape his sound. He dreamt of a life performing. However, music was not his only talent and life took him in another direction for a while.


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Saturday, September 5, 2009

Commercialization of Music

The commercialization of music has been changing since the days of the records of the 60’s to today’s digital era, the way commercial music has been sold has seen a spectacular change of guard.

Record labels, distributors, and music retailers have all understood the changing mindset of the population and have adapted to the ever changing needs. The impact of digital technology in all sectors of the music world has been immense and the commercialization of music is evolving rapidly even now.

The commercial music industry in the highest order consists of professional bands and singers contracted to record labels, which are the organizations that finance the recording in return to the rights of the recording, however the rights may be fully owned or partial. These companies manage the issues of brands and trademark which sometimes come under their own umbrella of labels. The big wigs of the label industry generally have a host of sub-labels that release music as well.

This is where independent musicians are different as they are not associated with any major record labels and indie musicians have their own way of going about their music business.

Coming back to the commercialization of music, the record labels work along with record distributors to promote and distribute their records in markets across the globe. When music is sold in the form of CD’s in stores or on websites, the performers retain a specific share of the money called royalties for certain period before the tracks are added to the library. Certain albums are labeled as classics and the band members continue to earn royalty even decades after the albums are released.

Lyrics of any album is released by a music publisher in print form to garner extra revenue. The media houses offering plump and lucrative advertisement campaigns to top music artists have become common these days. However, artists these days rely on live performances and merchandise selling to generate revenue. All this is different in the case of independent music.

The independent music industry has come of age in the recent past mainly due to the internet and digital distribution, thanks to initiatives such as Reverb Nation and the Tupelo Super Store who allow indie musicians to post their music and make it available to audiences worldwide and also provide intuitive marketing solutions to promote independent music.

The fact that, independent music holds a special place in the music business today is because of the passion and quality of music on offer from indie musicians and music is given higher preference over monetary returns. At the end of the day, how much ever the commercialization of music evolves, it is quality music that drives the audience than any other thing.

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