It is unusual to make a review of a book’s second edition. However, when “Creativity and Innovation in the Music Industry” was published in 2006 the outcome of the great transformation process of the music industry was anything than clear. Therefore, it was a great opportunity to revisit the developments in the music industry in the first five years after the millenium and to extent the historic analysis until 2011. This results in a total revision of the chapter on the “Digital Revolution” in the music industry. In the revised version the ongoing process of oligopolization of the recorded music industry is highlighted as well as the market entry of players from outside the industry in the music market. It is also shown that the digital revolution has transformed an initially album driven to a single track market that accounts for the sales slump of recorded music rather than file sharing did – as I pointed out extensively in this blog. However, the main finding in the second edition is that the digital revolution does not only create a totally new value-added network in the music indutsry, but results also in the emergence of a new aesthetic paradigm, just as Jazz became in the 1920s and Rock ‘n’ Roll in the 1950s. Therefore we can call the current paradigm shift in the music industry the “Digital Music Revolution”, since electronic dance music has the potential to impact the music creation for decades. “Instead of a song, which can be attributed to creators, a digital track can be used, changed, mixed and transformed. Music, therefore, will become fluid, which will chnage not only the existing copyright regime but also the meaning of music in a new social and cultural context” (pp. 196).
Peter Tschmuck, 2012, Creativity and Innovation in the Music Industry, 2nd edition, Springer Heidelberg. ISBN 978-3-642-28429-8, e-ISBN 978-3-642-28430-4
Print copies can be directly ordered from Springer Publishing. However single book chapters are also available as an eBook version.
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