Business




The music industry refers to the businesses connected with the creation and sale of music. It consists of songwriters and composers who create new songs and musical pieces, music producers and sound engineers who record songs and pieces, record labels and publishers that distribute recorded music products and sheet music internationally and that often control the rights to those products. Some music labels are "independent," while others are subsidiaries of larger corporate entities or international media groups. In the 2000s, the increasing popularity of listening to music as digital music files on MP3 players, iPods, or computers, and of trading music on file sharing websites or buying it online in the form of digital files had a major impact on the traditional music business. Many smaller independent CD stores went out of business as music buyers decreased their purchases of CDs, and many labels had lower CD sales. Some companies did well with the change to a digital format, though, such as Apple's iTunes, an online music store that sells digital files of songs over the Internet.

Intellectual property laws

In spite of some international copyright treaties, determining which music is in the public domain is complicated by the variety of national copyright laws that may be applicable. US copyright law formerly protected printed music published after 1923 for 28 years and with renewal for another 28 years, but the Copyright Act of 1976 made renewal automatic, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act changed the calculation of the copyright term to 70 years after the death of the creator. Recorded sound falls under mechanical licensing, often covered by a confusing patchwork of state laws; most cover versions are licensed through the Harry Fox Agency. Performance rights may be obtained by either performers or the performance venue; the two major organizations for licensing are BMI and ASCAP. Two online sources for public domain music are IMSLP (International Music Score Library Project) and Choral Public Domain Library (CPDL).

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