Blog 2: History/Current music distribution

⬅This round stuff called vinyl record was invented in the 40s and used vastly as a medium to distribute music.

Later in the days, podcasts and television took over this physical media with easier uniform distribution.

Like nowadays, musicians back in the 60s need to advertise their songs. Most bands then started as session musicians who performed in local bars, got recognized by producers, introduced to record labels.

➡The dude playing the drums here is called Buddy Rich. He was extensively known as "the world's greatest drummer". The title itself is pretty postmodern, which is largely thanks to his cooperation with TV channels.

In the 1950s, Buddy Rich was frequently a guest on "The Steve Allen Show" and "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson." by which he had chances to expose him to the public. In 1973, PBS broadcast Buddy Rich's performance in Rochester, and that was the first time thousands of drummers sat in a full-length concert listening to him.

Today is the age of Web 2.0, in which everything is about the Internet. Musicians found it hard to attract fans as people no longer sit watching live performances in front of a television. Instead, social media became a much more suitable platform to market performers as the audience can get closer to the musicians and leave a comment to interact with people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB-5Dxo2Rp8

Benny Greb is one of the most famous drummers now who got recognised by playing great grooves. Unlike, for example: Jojo Mayer, who actually goes and plays a lot, he incorporates with Drumeo, a famous youtube drumming channel published music videos of himself playing drums on YouTube and became famous for that. He previous wrote the "language of drumming" and spokes for Menil symbols. As you can see, his music videos are carefully controlled in terms of colour palettes which is very unconventional for a instrumentalist to do that. Higher qualities of video production keep the audiences to watch the video longer.

Most of the current music industry distribution big labels are pretty much the same as what is in the film industry. Sony EMI Universal Warner and other artist's personal labels.

The phenomenon is pretty much expected due to the conglomerate effect since the big companies just kept on buying other companies to create more profit.

Usually a record label handles all the aspect for producing songs: recording; arrenging; production; mixing; mastering; advertising; and distributing. They don't necessarily hire employees, but find independent producers to epibole the production and sign *immoral* contracts with singers. The distributing is probably handled by the employees.

The way how music is marketed have probably change from the previous era of cold media that people sees everything on the TV. Now it is more to do with social media. In china, making the album appearing on the front page of netlease music app, one of the biggest music song app in china, for only one day would cost over hundred thousands and that'll be the most effective way of campaigning. but I won't personally click into that unless I have heard of the artist somewhere else in social media.

Refering back to Benny Greb again, this is his instagram and he've been posting shorts. There is a high possibility that through the big data, drummer would have Benny's shorts been delivered in their recommendation. Howeve, his Instagram serves as an extension for his youtube channels since audiences tend to watch long videos on youtube, which usually instrumental music videos last longer.