Key Changes: The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry

Tells a new story about the history of the music business and the ten technological advances that disrupted it over the last century.

In recent years, narratives about the music industry tend to hew to a common theme: it was humming along for decades until the Internet and Napster came along and disrupted it. Key Changes shows that this view is incorrect: the industry was actually shaken up not once in the 1990s, but ten times over more than 100 years. These ten disruptions came with the introduction of new formats for enjoying recorded music: starting with the cylinders and discs played on early phonographs; then moving through radio, LPs, tapes, CDs, television, digital downloads, streaming, and streaming video; and then into Artificial Intelligence (AI), which enables a wide range of new capabilities with profound impacts upon the business. This book devotes a chapter to each of these formats, illustrating how such innovations beget shifts in creativity, consumer behavior, economics, and law.

Each of the technological innovations covered in this book not only disrupted the music business, but also fundamentally altered the industry's character. And while the technologies themselves have evolved in unique and varied ways over the decades, the changes within the business follow a clear pattern. Veteran music industry professionals and music technology experts Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt illuminate this pattern through a framework they term "the 6 Cs": cutting edge technology, channels of distribution, creators, consumers, cash, copyright. This framework provides insight into how such disparate innovations similarly disrupted and transformed the music business in each era. Extensively researched and supplemented by interviews with Grammy-winning artists, producers and executives, the book provides an insightful perspective on the ways technology has fundamentally altered the music industry, throughout history and into the present era.

Howie Singer is an expert on music industry technologies who played a leading role in the transition to digital music delivery. At Warner Music Group, he served as SVP and Chief Strategic Technologist analyzing new business models and services. Since 2018, he has taught a graduate class on "Data Analysis in the Music Industry" at NYU. Howie spent the first part of his career at Bell Labs and AT&T where he co-founded a2b music, an early digital music start-up.

Bill Rosenblatt is a leading independent expert on technologies related to copyright in the digital age. As President of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, the firm he founded in 2000, he has consulted to leading media and technology companies as well as public policy entities worldwide; and he has served as an expert witness in intellectual property litigations on these subjects. Bill teaches Data Analysis in the Music Industry in the Music Business program at NYU.