Book Description

"This is a book about how technology has affected the music industry through a series of disruptions that have taken place ten times over the past century. Whenever technological innovations result in a compelling new way to distribute music to the public, the music industry changes in myriad and fundamental ways to adjust to the new format. And while the technologies themselves have evolved over the decades, the changes within the business follow a distinct pattern. Key Changes describes this pattern: it defines an analytical structure, the 6C Framework, that explains how the music business transformed in each era. The ten disruptions are the formats for distributing recorded music: phonograph records, radio, LPs, tapes, CDs, television, digital downloads, streaming, and streaming video; and then into the future with voice response and AI technologies, where the changes are in progress now. Each of these has a chapter in the book. The book concludes with an examination of how the 6C Framework applies across the timeline of various music formats, as well as to technologically induced changes in other industries, ranging from movies to sports to coffee, and it offers some observations about how blockchain technology could be the source of the next set of disruptive innovations in the music industry"--