It is key that you mention audience in your essays.

Consider who they are in the music industry and start to use the terms – core or niche.

• Core – the big mass audiences who worldwide consume music – usually pop.
• Niche – those smaller, more particular audiences who consume sub-genres or follow specific smaller bands.

The Conglomerates will target the Mass/Core audiences.

The Indies are more focused on organic talent and appeasing their more discerning customers.

Where do you fall in this ‘broad’ and slightly naive audience segmentation?

One of the questions might be about audience behaviour so you must be able to talk about your own experiences of consuming and making music (if appropriate) and how you are ‘typical’ of the average music listener nowadays. It might be easier to adopt an approach that shows how you are easily consumed, attracted by the Big 3 to their marketing, image focused approach but also that you enjoy finding, following and listening to less synthetically produced material in the form of indie artists and can much more easily find this type of music because of Digital Technology and more importantly, they can more easily find you!

In order to write a response to the Music Industry question in the Audience and Institution section of Component 2, you must include the usual TEAS structure.

Terms – those terms to do with the music industry – you have learnt so far: production, distribution, marketing, exchange, exhibition, download, viral marketing, pluggers, managers, agents, record, labels, conglomerates, labels, The Big 3, digital technology etc.

Analysis/Significance – relating the examples to the question and how they might evidence, support or not, the question.

Examples: Case Studies…

…as young people you already have a number of case studies you could use from your own experience of the music industry; you all stream, download, go to festivals, watch music videos, belong to fan sites and follow etc. Some of you might also make music too.

But you need more than just that – you will need a range of up to date and specific case studies to help craft your argued response to the question.

We will be studying in depth one of the Big 3 and also an indie record label but we will also be expecting you to have some ‘scatter gun’ case studies you can call upon.

Music Industry case study power point i

• Each class will have their own copy in classroom.
• You will be allocated a story – you must read it – digest it and then
• In no more than 5 bullet points – summarise the main points of the article – stats, facts and its significance to either PDME.
• You will then share your story with the class.

The Big Three – AKA The Major Labels

The Big 3 labels are dominant players in the music industry.

They are in turn owned by massive media conglomerates.

But, what is a conglomerate?

Slide show on conglomerate in classroom

So, what does a record label actually do?

And who are the Indies?

This article outlines some of the best indie record labels on the scene.  Click on the arrow on the right of the photo to see who the label is.