SBE-330 Week 1 Case Study: Changing Nature of Music Industry

Document Content and Description Below

SBE-330 Week 1 Case Study: Changing Nature of Music Industry Case Study: Changing Nature of the Music Industry Can you map the different kinds of innovation in the cas... e study? Which were incremental & which radical/discontinuous? Why? Give examples to support your answer The music industry provided artists one path, & one way only, to reach & bond with their fans & monetize their pre-recorded music. Artists had to sign to a record label, transferring ownership of copyrights, relinquishing limited artistic control, & giving up the majority of the revenue from the sale of their recordings. Fans could simply buy pre-recorded music in physical form from retail outlets from the limited number of artists that labels choose to anoint. Labels were conscious of their unique position & took full advantage of it by gouging mutually artists & music fans. However, thanks to recent technology, the complete old school music industry is a hairbreadth's gone from being dead. In the new digital music industry, the gatekeepers are left out & so the abundance of obstacles for artists & music fans. With the launch of streaming services, the explosion of broadband & high-speed Net access via ever-present devices – i.e. smart phones, tablets etc - the only remaining pertinent piece of the old industry is AM/FM radio in cars. This last bastion of what was will be disappeared within the next 24 months. With this final change, the fall down of the old industry will be complete. There has been two ways for listening music since 90 years: - on AM/FM radio and/or purchasing pre-recorded music in a "format" (vinyl, cassette, CD, MP3 etc). If someone heard a song they liked, they would most frequently purchase the album with that song on it & play it via a hardware device. For over sixty years, music fans bought their pre-recorded music almost completely on vinyl. In 1979, there was a shift with the launch of the Sony Walkman. Prior to the arrival of the Walkman only AM/FM radio was portable. The Walkman provided the first truly portable & handy way for music fans to take their own music with them. Now we are left with a few choices; streaming websites, advertisement-based streaming, & paying for music. Websites, such as Vimeo, YouTube, Soundcloud, Deezer & others allow the user to listen music for free, but charge for certain premium features. There are also websites such as iTunes & Amazon websites (and many more) that allow us to download music. Class, new question from Chapter 3 of the text. Discuss some of the laws that generally regulate business activity in this country, & give some historical background on the major laws that affect all entrepreneurs today. Jon 11/7/2012 5:23:43 PM Small business owners face a never ending job of keeping up with the laws & regulations by which they must abide. One problem is that the wording of many laws & regulations is often baffling & easy to misunderstand. A second prolems for small businesses is the enormous amount of paperwork required to generate the many reports & records mandated by regulations. This paperwork imposes time & resource burdens on business owners who are often strapp for both. A third problem is the cost.(Hatten, 4th Edition, 2009, Small business Management Entrepreneurship & Beyond) RE: Laws & Betty & class, excellent feedback on the laws & historical background. To review, four groups of law are: •Consumer: Consumer protection became popular with Ralph Nader in the 1960s. Some government agencies that protect consumers are the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) & the Consumer Product Safety Commission. •Competition: This includes such acts as the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 & also the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) set up to prevent unfair trade practices & prevent monopolies from occurring. •Environment: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created to enforce & deal with the complex environmental laws. •Equality & Safety: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was started to deal with many different kinds of discrimination. There is also the ADEA & American with Disabilities Act (ADA) to deal with disabilities & age discrimination. Some of the control agencies are the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), dealing with equality, & OSHA, dealing with issues of health & safety. Of course, there are many more, & new legislation almost every day! Comments? URLs? JON At least in the tech industry the patent scene (I think this falls under competition) looks to be getting ugly. It seems like you can't innovate anymore without patent trolls claiming to have prior rights to your work. They don't even make claims that are likely to hold up in a court. They just want settlements & to set precedents where they win in court so they can use it against other companies. This seems like a major threat to anyone starting a company in a tech industry. You can't do it without having a lawyer for backup anymore. Professor while reviewing the laws that were regulated to protect consumers I often wonder how entrepreneurs who are involved with food products how much are they actually governed by the Food & Drug Administration? Also when someone opens a restaurant what is the exact role of the owner to it's customer in regards to making sure their products are safe? With so many salmonella cases arising is the agency not equipped to properly protect the consumer or is it they don't have enough staff to oversea every situation. I'm asking because I just noticed a vendor who used to sell Jamaican food from his cart & now has a store front without the proper sticker in the window , but still is selling food. Is this illegal? Examples of laws that affect all businesses, including start-ups, are the environmental laws. Businesses can’t contaminate water sources by dumping harmful chemicals on rivers or lakes. Businesses can’t have gas emissions into the air that are too polluted either. Other laws that everybody has to abide by are related to minimum wages; these are important laws because start-ups are oftentimes strap for money. Minimum wage laws have been in effect since the 1930’s, when there were created to make sure the unemployment pressured back then didn’t degenerate in people getting paid very little in exchange for having one of the few jobs available at the time. [Show More]

Last updated: 10 months ago

Preview 1 out of 7 pages