Is there a future? : an analysis of the music industry through its history and its strategy for survival in the age of peer to peer & file sharing technologies

The recorded music business is presently at a crossroads: new technologies have forever changed the way business is conducted, revenues are getting smaller every year, the conversion of revenue origin from sales of physical products to digital ones is not happening at a rate anywhere near what would be needed for one format to subsidize the other, the major players are merging at the same rate that their sales decrease and the old adage that claims "in business, one plus one does not always equal two" has proven to be truer than ever in each one of the mergers. What follows aims to introduce readers to the history of the so called "music industry", analyze its growth and expansion throughout the twentieth century, its crisis in the late 1990's as new technologies changed the playing field and its struggle for survival in the new century. The behavior of the corporate powers in the business has been replicated throughout their subsidiaries worldwide in scaled versions, making it possible to "generalize" on the use of certain examples from around the world, and the response of music consumers -the end users- has been extremely massified, almost homogeneous as well. Meaning, examples from different parts of the world normally apply to the business in general.

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Management.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Kejner, Camilo

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Roberto Rigobon.

• Sloan School of Management.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/39525

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/39525