Early history: Printed music in Europe , the only way to copy
sheet music was by hand, a costly and time-consuming process. Pictured is the hand-written music manuscript for a French
Ars subtilior chanson (song) from the late 1300s about love, entitled
Belle, bonne, sage, by Baude Cordier. The
music notation is unusual in that it is written in a heart shape, with red notes indicating rhythmic
alterations. Music publishing using machine-printed
sheet music developed during the
Renaissance music era in the mid-15th century. The development of music publication followed the evolution of
printing technologies that were first developed for printing regular
books. After the mid-15th century, mechanical techniques for printing sheet music were first developed. The earliest example, a set of liturgical chants, dates from about 1465, shortly after the
Gutenberg Bible was printed. Prior to this time, music had to be copied out by hand. To copy music notation by hand was a very costly, labor-intensive, and time-consuming process, so it was usually undertaken only by monks and priests seeking to preserve sacred music for the church. The few collections of secular (non-religious) music that are extant were commissioned and owned by wealthy aristocrats. Examples include the
Squarcialupi Codex of Italian
Trecento music and the
Chantilly Codex of French
Ars subtilior music. The use of printing enabled sheet music to be reproduced much more quickly and at a much lower cost than hand-copying music notation. This helped musical styles to spread to other cities and countries more quickly, and it also enabled music to be spread to more distant areas. Before the invention of music printing, a composer's music might only be known in the city she lived in and its surrounding towns, because only wealthy aristocrats would be able to afford to have hand copies made of her music. With music printing, a composer's music could be printed and sold at a relatively low cost to purchasers from a wide geographic area. As sheet music of major composer's pieces and songs began to be printed and distributed in a wider area, this enabled composers and listeners to hear new styles and forms of music. A German composer could buy songs written by an Italian or English composer, and an Italian composer could buy pieces written by Dutch composers and learn how they wrote music. This led to more blending of musical styles from different countries and regions.
Ottaviano Petrucci was the pioneer of modern music printing (born in Fossombrone in 1466 – died in 1539 in Venice), a printer and publisher who was able to secure a twenty-year monopoly on printed music in Venice during the 16th century.
Venice was one of the major business and music centers during this period. His
Harmonice Musices Odhecaton, a collection of chansons printed in 1501, is commonly misidentified as the first book of sheet music printed from movable type. That distinction belongs to the Roman printer Ulrich Han's
Missale Romanum of 1476. Nevertheless, Petrucci's later work was extraordinary for the complexity of his white mensural notation and the smallness of his font. He printed the first book of
polyphony (music with two or more independent melodic lines) using movable type. He also published numerous works by the most highly regarded composers of the Renaissance, including
Josquin des Prez and
Antoine Brumel. He flourished by focusing on Flemish works, rather than Italian, as they were very popular throughout Europe during the
Renaissance music era. His printing shop used the triple-impression method, in which a sheet of paper was pressed three times. The first impression was the staff lines, the second the words, and the third the notes. This method produced very clean and readable results, although it was time-consuming and expensive. Until the 18th century, the processes of formal composition and of the printing of music took place for the most part with the support of
patronage from
aristocracies and
churches. In the mid-to-late 18th century, performers and composers such as
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart began to seek more commercial opportunities to market their music and performances to the general public. After Mozart's death, his wife (
Constanze Weber) continued the process of commercialization of his music through an unprecedented series of memorial concerts, selling his manuscripts, and collaborating with her second husband,
Georg Nissen, on a biography of Mozart. In the 19th century,
sheet-music publishers dominated the music industry. Before the invention of
sound recording technologies, the main way for music lovers to hear new symphonies and
opera arias (songs) was to buy the sheet music (often arranged for piano or for a small chamber music group) and perform the music in a living room, using friends who were amateur musicians and singers. In the United States, the music industry arose in tandem with the rise of "
black face"
minstrelsy. Blackface is a form of theatrical makeup used predominantly by non-black performers to represent a
black person. The practice gained popularity during the 19th century and contributed to the spread of negative
racial stereotypes of African-American people. In the late part of the century the group of music publishers and songwriters which dominated
popular music in the United States became known as
Tin Pan Alley. The name originally referred to a specific place: West 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenue in
Manhattan, and a plaque on the sidewalk on 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth commemorates it. The start of Tin Pan Alley is usually dated to about 1885, when several music publishers set up shop in the same district of Manhattan. The end of Tin Pan Alley is less clear-cut. Some date it to the start of the
Great Depression in the 1930s when the
phonograph and radio supplanted
sheet music as the driving force of American popular music, while others consider Tin Pan Alley to have continued into the 1950s when earlier styles of American popular music were upstaged by the rise of
rock & roll.
Advent of recorded music and radio broadcasting at the
Smithsonian Institution in 1916 where she was recording
Blackfoot chief
Mountain Chief for the
Bureau of American Ethnology. In this picture, Mountain Chief is listening to a recording. At the dawn of the early 20th century, the development of
sound recording began to function as a
disruptive technology to the commercial interests which published sheet music. During the sheet music era, if a regular person wanted to hear popular new songs, he or she would buy the sheet music and play it at home on a piano, or learn the song at home while playing the
accompaniment part on piano or guitar. Commercially released
phonograph records of musical performances, which became available starting in the late 1880s, and later the onset of widespread
radio broadcasting, starting in the 1920s, forever changed the way music was heard and listened to. Opera houses, concert halls, and clubs continued to produce music and musicians and singers continued to perform live, but the power of radio allowed bands, ensembles and singers who had previously performed only in one region to become popular on a nationwide and sometimes even a worldwide scale. Moreover, whereas attendance at the top symphony and opera concerts was formerly restricted to high-income people in a pre-radio world, with
broadcast radio, a much larger wider range of people, including lower and middle-income people could hear the best
orchestras,
big bands, popular singers and opera shows. The "record industry" eventually replaced the sheet music publishers as the music industry's largest force. A multitude of record labels came and went. Some noteworthy labels of the earlier decades include the
Columbia Records, Crystalate,
Decca Records, Edison Bell,
The Gramophone Company, Invicta, Kalliope,
Pathé,
Victor Talking Machine Company and many others. Many record companies died out as quickly as they had formed, and by the end of the 1980s, the "Big six" —
EMI,
CBS,
BMG,
PolyGram,
WEA and
MCA — dominated the industry.
Sony bought
CBS Records in 1987 and changed its name to Sony Music in 1991. In mid-1998, PolyGram Music Group merged with MCA Music Entertainment creating what we now know as
Universal Music Group. Sony and BMG merged in 2004, and Universal took over the majority of EMI's recorded music interests in 2012.
EMI Music Publishing, also once part of the now defunct British conglomerate, is now co-owned by Sony as a subsidiary of
Sony/ATV Music Publishing. As in other industries, the record industry is characterised by many mergers and/or acquisitions, for the major companies as well as for middle sized business (recent example is given by the Belgium group
PIAS and French group
Harmonia Mundi). Genre-wise, music entrepreneurs expanded their industry models into areas like
folk music, in which composition and performance had continued for centuries on an
ad hoc self-supporting basis. Forming an
independent record label, or "indie" label, or signing to such a label continues to be a popular choice for up-and-coming musicians, especially in genres like
hardcore punk and
extreme metal, even though indies cannot offer the same financial backing of major labels. Some bands prefer to sign with an indie label, because these labels typically give performers more artistic freedom.
Rise of digital online distribution 's online
iTunes store, which sells digital files of songs and musical pieces–along with a range of other content, such as digital files of
TV shows and
movies In the first decade of the 2000s, digitally downloaded and
streamed music became more popular than buying physical recordings (e.g.
CDs,
records and
tapes). This gave consumers almost "friction-less" access to a wider variety of music than ever before, across multiple devices. At the same time, consumers spent less money on recorded music (both physically and digitally distributed) than they had in the 1990s. Total "music-business" revenues in the U.S. dropped by half, from a high of $14.6 billion in 1999 to $6.3 billion in 2009. Worldwide revenues for CDs,
vinyl, cassettes and
digital downloads fell from $36.9 billion in 2000 to $15.9 billion in 2010.
The Economist and
The New York Times reported that the downward trend was expected to continue for the foreseeable future. This dramatic decline in revenue has caused large-scale layoffs inside the industry, driven some more venerable retailers (such as
Tower Records) out of business and forced record companies, record producers, studios, recording engineers and musicians to seek new
business models. In response to the rise of widespread illegal
file sharing of digital music-recordings, the record industry took aggressive legal action. In 2001 it succeeded in shutting down the popular music-website
Napster, and threatened legal action against thousands of individuals who participated in sharing music-song sound-files. The 2008 British Music Rights survey showed that 80% of people in Britain wanted a legal
peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing service, however only half of the respondents thought that the music's creators should be paid. The survey was consistent with the results of earlier research conducted in the United States, upon which the
Open Music Model was based. Legal digital downloads became widely available with the debut of the Apple
iTunes Store in 2003. The popularity of music distribution over the
Internet has increased, and by 2011 digital music sales topped physical sales of music. In 2008, Atlantic Records reports that digital sales have surpassed physical sales. Spotify distributes approximately 70% to rights-holders, who will then pay artists based on their agreements. The variable, and (some say) inadequate nature of this compensation, has led to criticism. Spotify reports paying on average US$0.006 to US$0.008 per stream. In response to concerns, Spotify claims that they are benefiting the music business by migrating "them away from piracy and less monetized platforms and allowing them to generate far greater royalties than before" by encouraging users to use their paid service. The
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) revealed in its 2015 earnings report that streaming services were responsible for 34.3 percent of the year's U.S. recorded-music-industry revenue, growing 29 percent from the previous year and becoming the largest source of income, pulling in around $2.4 billion. US streaming revenue grew 57 percent to $1.6 billion in the first half of 2016 and accounted for almost half of industry sales. This contrasts with the $14.6 billion in revenue that was received in 1999 by the U.S. music industry from the sale of CDs. The turmoil in the recorded-music industry in the 2000s altered the twentieth-century balance between artists, record companies, promoters, retail music-stores and consumers. ,
big-box stores such as
Wal-Mart and
Best Buy sell more records than music-only CD stores, which have ceased to function as a major player in the music industry. Music-performing artists now rely on
live performance and
merchandise sales (T-shirts, sweatshirts, etc.) for the majority of their income, which in turn has made them more dependent – like pre-20th-century musicians – on patrons, now exemplified by music promoters such as
Live Nation (which dominates tour promotion and owns or manages a large number of
music venues). At the other extreme, record companies can offer a simple manufacturing- and
distribution-deal, which gives a higher percentage to the artist, but does not cover the expenses of marketing and promotion. Companies like
Kickstarter help independent musicians produce their albums through
fans funding bands they want to listen to. Many newer artists no longer see a
record deal as an integral part of their
business plan at all. Inexpensive recording-hardware and -software make it possible to record reasonable-quality music on a laptop in a bedroom and to distribute it over the Internet to a worldwide audience. This has caused problems for recording studios, record producers and
audio engineers: the
Los Angeles Times reports that as many as half of the recording facilities in that city have failed. Changes in the music industry have given consumers access to a wider variety of music than ever before, at a price that gradually approaches zero. However,
consumer spending on music-related software and hardware increased dramatically over the last decade, providing a valuable new income-stream for
technology companies such as
Apple Inc. and
Pandora Radio. ==Sales statistics==