Music Business Commons^™

Rock On: The State Of Rock Music Among Generation Z, Gianna Cicchetti

Honors College Theses

Rock music is a significant part of American culture and has always had ties to the socialization of the youth since its rise in the 1950s. Many musicians and music journalists have pushed forth the opinion that the genre is “dead” as its relevance in young adult culture has faded away in favor of different genres of mainstream music. However, rock artists have seen more success and virality in the past few years. This is primarily true through the social media platform TikTok, the largest platform of its kind with most young people as part of its userbase. The following ...

Grasping The Intangible: The Perseverance Of Physical Music Media In A Digital World, Sam Youmans

Honors Theses

Music is a unique economic good with several interesting characteristics: as an art form, its value is immensely subjective and changes with the culture; it is most widely consumed via online streaming platforms but still embedded onto physical formats and sold through retailers; and the United States music business had to pivot through substantial economic disruption at the turn of the century with the advent of peer-to-peer file sharing. Given the digital world in which we live, this thesis explains why people still purchase music on physical formats. This is accomplished by discussing revenue data from the past few years ...

The Benefits Of A Professional Website For A Musician, April C. Cain

MDS/BAS 495 Undergraduate Capstone Projects

For my capstone project at Boise State, I decided to create a website for my music. I am a music producer and needed a professional web presence for promotion, current and future fans, professional contacts, and to also serve as a portfolio of my work. There are also added benefits for future projects in the form of a blog and file selling features. I researched web-building platforms and methods as well the benefits of having a website for not just myself but for fans and other consumers of music and developed an action plan to create my own professional website ...

Time Machine, William B. Sims, Joseph P. Robinette, Reid W. Sorel

Honors Theses

The album will be organic, raw, gritty country sound, inspired by vintage country/folk and bluegrass and encouraged by modern underground/alt country and new-wave folk.

Spotify: You Have A Hit!, Christopher E. Dawson Jr., Steve Mann, Edward Roske, Gauthier Vasseur

SMU Data Science Review

Abstract. Over 87% of the streaming music is owned by four major record labels (Jones, 2018). Yet, the songs owned by those labels account for <1% of the total amount of music created each year. These labels are historically better at identifying talent (though this talent identification is becoming more difficult). Even though Spotify has 36% of the streaming marketing share (T4, 2021), Spotify has not been profitable because of the large licensing costs paid to the large music labels. If Spotify could identify hit songs & artists before the large labels, they would sign those artists and dramatically reduce their licensing costs. Using the Spotify API, this paper will use Spotify data on over 400K songs over the last three years for exploratory data analysis, provide descriptive statistics, perform feature selection, and develop models using LASSO and XGBOOST Classification. The research determined multiple key features and predicted with over 60% accuracy songs which were going to be a hit (defined as >90% popularity).

Building A Record Label Website In An Evolving Music Industry, Zachary Mouton

MDS/BAS 495 Undergraduate Capstone Projects

The basis of my capstone project is to build a website for my record label Play-Yah Records. My major focus for the website is to find more options for monetization for the bands on the label. During the process I conducted research on NFT’s, music licensing, website construction, logo design, and made-to-order merchandise. I am excited about what I have learned in this project and I can’t wait to share it with you.

Still Dreaming Of You: Selena's Discourse With And Continuing Impact On American Musical Culture, Hannah Lastra

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Selena Quintanilla Perez continues to circulate in popular culture, including MAC cosmetic lines, a Netflix series, and podcasts. As a result, her cultural influence continues to be passed on and shared with future generations. This thesis focuses on three aspects of Selena and Selena y Los Dinos: Selena’s music, Selena’s performance aesthetic, and Selena’s fandom today. Chapter 1 focuses on Selena y Los Dinos’ American musical influences, particularly studying the songs “Enamorada de ti,” “Missing my Baby,” and “Fotos y Recuerdos” and the presence of American genres of new jack swing, R&B, and rock within them ...

The Budding Disruption Of Blockchain Technology Upon The Current Structure Of The Music Industry, Bradley Rauman

Senior Theses

One of the most pertinent opportunities within the music industry, and many other industries as well, stems from the use of blockchain technology. Blockchain’s core technology, which enables smart contracts and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), could be used to restructure and decentralize the music industry to be in alignment with the best interests of artists - the individuals responsible for driving the success of this industry.

The current system is outmoded. It evinces a disparity in the level of information held by artists and intermediaries (i.e. labels, publishers, and streaming services) and this disparity enables intermediaries to deduct egregious fees ...

Fostering Music Performers In The 21st Century: A Contemporary Professional Perspective Toward A New Curricular Agenda For Graduate Study In Music, Andre Januario

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

What if the core curriculum for graduate students in music performance were designed to prepare students to succeed in the world of the Fourth Industrial Revolution?

This dissertation offers a hypothetical answer: a structured and systematic academic curricular framework for music graduate students of performance of concert music (especially those in terminal degrees, such as doctoral students), along with music instructors, professional music performers, school administrators, and college professors, seeking to prepare such students for achieving and maintaining a music career more in keeping with the current work environment, especially those skills demanded by the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the ...

Profits For Spotify, Pennies For Artists, Joshua R. Rosenberg

Capstones

Major recording labels have always been king-making investment houses. They market the music and manage the careers of artists such as New York singer-songwriter Blake Morgan, who has to fight tooth and nail to escape being mistreated financially. But digital distribution services have now come along and upped the parasitic ante. By dominating global market share and distributing millions of songs for the labels, companies like Spotify are piggybacking on the music industry’s already exploitative system and magnifying it exponentially. The more content you control, the larger the overall profit–even if the overwhelming majority of content creators are ...

Intellectual Property In The Digital Streaming Age: How Music Becomes A Lawsuit, Alexandra Tasev

Honors College Theses

A mix of both entertainment business and law, the purpose of this review is to address the question of “are current copyright laws and procedures too restrictive of new and smaller-name artists from entering the market?” Through a law review and analysis of the history of copyright law, this thesis outlines the issues new, smaller music artists face as a result of rapid digital evolution paired with a slow-moving legal system. Failing to amend the current standards for dealing with old copyright cases will cause further issues with the growing popularity of digital platforms like YouTube, Soundcloud, Spotify, and TikTok ...

An Approach To The Impact On The Market And Music Consumption After The Emergence Of Streaming Technology, Letícia Ledoux

Business

Consumption in the music industry has been changing considerably, moving from the analogue to the digital phase and finally to the total dematerialization of music. Despite digitalization making consumption more accessible and democratic to consumers, the emergence of piracy is becoming a problem for the music industry, which faces dizzying declines in its sales. In an era that is virtually impossible to control online consumption, streaming technology is developed and launched which, in addition to curbing illegal downloading practices, creates a new business model and becomes a new consumer trend as it develops. Based on this scenario, where digital and ...

Social Power Of Jazz Festivals, Olga Bekenshtein

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Jazz festivals occur in all parts of the world, small cities and metropolises, urban and rural landscapes, stadiums, churches, streets, and abandoned factories. Being a part of the entertainment industry, they have the potential to impact social change. Jazz festivals help us reconsider notions of identity and community, and their communal experience has the potential to undermine dominant social norms. The industry of jazz festivals is based on Black music and has a history of positive and negative social outcomes. Evaluating festivals through the symbolic meaning of music provides an optic into how festivals marginalize and exploit African American cultural ...

The Next Frontier: Blockchain In The Music Industry, Manuel J. Manriquez Jr

Backstage Pass

This Research Paper takes a look at how Blockchain technology can potentially change the music industry as we know it!

The Lack Of Asian American Representation In American Pop Music, Victoria Noriega

Honors College Theses

The purpose of this study is to analyze why there are fewer East and Southeast Asian Americans in the American pop music industry compared to other ethnicities and to see what factors influence these statistics. The data analyzed consisted of five interviews, all of whom were involved in the music industry as either musicians or managers. Data from the most recently signed artists to the top three major music companies, Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Universal Music Group, was also analyzed to see the most popular genre signed and most frequent ethnicity signed. From the data gathered from ...

How Streaming Services Changed The Way We Listen To And Pay For Music, Claire Carter

Honors Theses

This thesis seeks to explain how streaming services have changed the way we listen to and pay for music. Furthermore, this analysis examines the perspective of consumers and artists on streaming services. Most data is obtained from various academic journals and organizations involved in the music industry. The result of this research indicates that after the financial peak of the music industry in 1999, a decline in revenues was due to emerging technology, the illegal file sharing website Napster and piracy, the industry’s response to piracy, and digital downloads. As streaming services started to emerge the shift in revenues ...

Sample-Based Hip-Hop Music And Fair Use Laws In The Age Of Streaming Services, Michael Vanbuhler

Senior Theses

This thesis takes an in depth look at the history and processes behind creating sample-based music. Sampling was popularized during the beginnings of hip-hop music and now a wide variety of genres use samples or techniques created by sample-based music. Early hip-hop beats took samples of drum breaks or a portion of a track from another artist or band. As hip-hop grew in the late 80s and early 90s, the use of samples became a question of intellectual property rights and if it was acceptable to sample someone’s copyrighted work. Lawsuits in the early 90’s helped to create ...

The Supply Chain Of Digital Music: Empowering Independent Artists Through Availability And Accessibility, Justin Reed

Senior Theses

The process of creating and sharing digital music can be viewed from the “supply chain” perspective: identifying the resources and value-adding tools that ultimately result in a final audio product. By researching and documenting the steps involved in this process, I identify this supply chain as a series of steps, an itinerary, or process model of digital music creation. Moreover, I found that each step in the process can be assess for its accessibility and usability by independent artists. I conclude by exploring how this democratizes the music industry by affording independent artists the necessary tools and empowerment to create ...

Motivational Antecedents To Fandom And The Resultant Effects In The Foreign Contemporary Music Market, Hyun Sang An, Wooyang Kim, C. Anthony Di Benedetto

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

No abstract provided.

Dichotomies: Lessons From A College Life On Tour, Alexander J. Dontre

All Faculty and Staff Scholarship

In this unique memoir, the author reveals his struggles and triumphs as a touring musician pursuing a college education. From 2011-2017, Alex Dontre performed 505 concerts with his band Psychostick while simultaneously enrolled in rigorous online courses. It culminated with a master's degree in Business Psychology from Franklin University, at which time he gave the commencement speech at his graduation as valedictorian.