NAPSTER AND SPOTIFY, it turns out, were just tip-of-the-iceberg stuff. Today, thanks to the frenetic pace of tech advancement and the insatiability of young, internet-grown audiences, the global music business moves at breakneck speed. It evolves, expands, and upends itself on the daily; it is an innovator’s playground and paradise.
Alongside record labels and publishers, the industry’s big bosses now include data analysts, financial entrepreneurs, algorithm creators, engineers, economists, and also artists and songwriters, who — freshly empowered by the cheap music-making tools and easy social media platforms available to them — are wresting real control of their own empires for the first time. (“Hail to the artists, because … they’re winning,” veteran music mogul Jimmy Iovine mused in 2019. “The artists now have something they’ve never had before,…