Island good to go become a safe. Place even K.-Tel be quick and music for sledging each label a unique intoxicating color the island pink is the political red the Decca blue the harvest green and yellow. There was a dozen logo the collision amount Hatta the Virgin cow and twins designed by what the dean of the to go swirl the font on if that looped around to the t. The stocks clicking finger. And. It made me swoon with anticipation the way a record was not just a sound a song but also is designed as an object to plug up a thing that you could peel apart that technical in lieu of Clinton mation about itself on the outside on the inside a solid object that turned into the sound you craved once you drop the needle into the plastic. Eventually for a brief shining moment I even had my own record label designing. Inspired by island and factory. Self-conscious an exuberant tribute the very idea of the record label is a work of performance art in its own way. The world has changed and music slips into Isn't life in different quick illogically small to reflect romantic ways. But all popular music sounds the way it does and excites and moves fans love as dunces listeners teenagers grandparents innocent bystanders. Because of the record and the label. The stormy sensational relationship between the musician on the label that resulted sonically conceptually philosophically technically commercially visually in the record. And even though the record does not exist in the way it once did the kind of pop music that appeared because of the record produced in a studio is a multi tracked assembly of sound effects poetic. But just plain content still very much does it. For now whatever happens to the record industry this post vinyl posi post internet pop music does not seem threaten to toll. Hence the confusion as to whether the record industry as we know it dominated by the 4 competitive conglomerates Sony is a universal is dead as media reports suggest well just regenerating working out its next move after a few years of panic ignorance and confusion if you work in this business and recognize the seismic changes that we're going through and how the world's a shifting you'd have to be blind to that is that there is something going on that we have to. The need to address Nick get filled head of e.m.i. Across both the u.k. And the u.s. To east I really do believe there is a positive future for the business you see the appetite for music out there for music has never been greater we've had a challenging year and you know we're working very hard to hear of profit targets for the year. Mike Smith who heads the u.k. Arm of Colombia under the Sony corporate umbrella but was still delivering a substantial multi-million pound profit for a company on this plenty of other businesses in so many different areas that don't even getting anywhere near making a profit I can't be knocked off course by what newspapers or what journalists or pundits. Say think. About the industry in which my life 2 Grange chairman and chief executive of the Universal Music Group International which controls a 3rd share of the u.k. Market what I do know. Is that as investors in music we've increased our level investment in music and we've bought more music and more hits and more songs and more variety of different genres to more people in more ways and we've made more movement the last 2 years than the industry did in the previous twenty's. Death of the record label because we're not making the ludicrous profits through making the 9090 I absolutely think the business got bloated in the ninety's and the whipping that we get from the press has to do with that. From the beginning of a time when the idea of listening to music in your home let alone on the move was as wild as the idea of space travel the record industry has grown and developed because of technological innovations and advancements in how sound is recorded stored amplified duplicated and transferred to the listener who was very quickly the customer the consumer and then played back by the listener on fancy new contraptions and gadgets. Cylinders led eventually to the more jubilant flat file. Of acoustic recording led to increasingly sophisticated electronic recording. Singletrack taping led to multi-track taping and for a few decades those 20th century developments were distilled down into the atmospheric sound of the 7 inch vinyl single and the 12 inch vinyl albums. In the late 1940 s. That dominated the fifty's sixty's and seventy's accompanied by the neat cassette if not the. Butt. In though with the disc pop music is an art form it found its perfect casing its dream flaying is not to canvas the research and development of technicians interested in the quality of the more efficient methods of. Playing it . Scientific progress in acoustics and electronics decreasing the complex recording process and the sophistication of recording studios incorporating digital techniques led to the early 1980 s. Emergence of the compact disc a by product of the laser disc developed by Sony and Philips. When the cd 1st appeared in engineering Malva with a rainbow sheen back. To Mo's world as though the shiny silver future. It didn't really seem to be the form that would have beautiful vinyl and definitely not the toxin that would ultimately infect the entire music industry after a period of considerable industry and consumer gratification I don't want to. Chrysalis and canvas chief curator of the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles are tremendous in that it's for the very 1st time it's sort of the engineers dream it's perfect for. Because it was just so wonderful to sit and listen to music with that incredible sound quality it was just. A huge experience. Now it doesn't really take off for the mass public until players become more affordable it takes several years for it to sort of outcompete the record set but what's phenomenal about the cd is the. So-called rescuing old music that that. Watches what the cd makes possible and digital recording digital remastering it makes possible going back and finding all these old recordings and bringing it to market and the 1st big boom of that is with the Robert Johnson box that sells all this copies and nobody can imagine what it's all blue sky we're selling you know thousands of copies of this record I gave. Them. The label start waking up to the possibility of their all back catalog. Cd it really is the main thing that kicks that into gear and makes possible that issue in the back catalog that has emerged I think all of our musical lives is part of that you know you had to be a record collector get go out and find that stuff and that was a great search and if you were part of that culture was a wonderful and very satisfying thing to do but it wasn't easy. To. Keep. The disc was 12 centimeters in diameter slightly larger than a originally planned allegedly so that it could contain Beethoven's 9th Symphony in its entirety this meant up to 74 minutes of music could fit onto a compact disc which would have an impact on popular music historically suited to the 2 sided album of up to 40 minutes of music the 1st C.D.'s released in November 1982 were classical produced for those affluent audio files who it seemed could afford the more expensive disks and the machines to play them on as disc and play a rapidly got cheaper leading to Sony's $980.00 full disk man. Soon cool to. See the soon became an easy sell and looked like Julie compared to the quickly old fashioned singing vinyl 1985 David Bowie's entire catalog was converted to compact disc the old Futurist setting the track record labels indulge themselves with these new sorts of profits and the extra money of. But the basics. Of music making. Even though at the time. Possibilities. The potential pitfalls. Explained the 1st Simon and Chris Wright. Because we needed something to revitalize the. Kind of stuff because everybody went out and all the favorite records on cd I mean it was fantastic it was a huge huge for the record industry. Until the 87 the. Deal with off 8. 100. 25 albums if I. Say that with. My 25 albums and. If you look at the profit margins. Between L.P.'s and C.D.'s the C.D.'s were enormously more profitable and when you have that much money coming in that is that you can keep people paying themselves high salaries and the success of the label they begin to think is going to go on forever and they're not as creative but they think that. The problem with that is that none of us are and we always have to return to our 1st principles and figure out what it is we're doing. This wasn't the only area where the music industry was confounded by new developments that would eventually control of music media technology in the marketplace. Wasn't just. The decade of the compact disc it was also the decade of m.t.v. . Question I mean. It was very clear we could have. A substantial portion. To make sure that they had secured. Who started in the legal department of c.b.s. In 1973 and rose to become the vice president of Sony Music. I think you. Could have. If you know. The people who. Invented because it was a natural progression from the the idea of sharing music across the Internet and this really is a fan's reaction to the price of cd albums and often the way good material was buried amongst the mediocre emerged at the end of the 20th century based on a digital audio encoding format which had only been around since the early ninety's the fact that m.p. 3 files with cd sounding quality was spreading on the Internet by 997 making it easy to swap music online because of its powerful compression did not figure in the calculations of record company bosses at the time loop Perry was president of e.m.i. Records in the u.k. I think the biggest change took place in the early ninety's when the world moved to digital. We've heard about digital in and people said oh we don't like digital recording and that when I think back about it and I think about a couple of digital meetings I think myself I really didn't understand what it was about we were very early to the game which had got her who started life as a musician and songwriter helped Seymour Stein establish records but it was the likes of Blondie in the Go-Go's and in 1997 formed the old Should we began by being the exclusive supplier of independent music to most of the online internet stores essentially it was physical product that people bought mail order but that was only the beginning of it the future really was in the transition to digital What was your view of why the major labels made such a catastrophic cope with the download world seem to misread old similes terribly It's hard to say it really is hard to say I've given that a lot of thought fear I think mostly Was this something we didn't quite have control of nobody cared you know everybody was just looked at it as just being doesn't matter that we don't and the cassette Yes this is a history of the record label even if we are discussing fear loathing anxiety and loss of control written and presented by me pull Molly who's wondering along with record men such as support Jonathan Poneman ex Virgin boss pull convoy and one time c.b.s. Chief pulled muscle exactly how the record industry so badly misread the revolution in musical technology the proposed a world where record labels were released the major music business conglomerates were redundant I mean Philips and the patent on the cd didn't matter the end of the day they needed the repertoire but the difference with digital was that if you owned the player and then you could transmit the music to the playa you just cut out the distribution you know they missed the trick by not getting active earlier. Not that they won't catch up but the trick they missed and why I think they missed it was that the industry traditionally was controlled by a small group of people and what happens with the major companies they focused so much on controlling their market and controlling their position. And not letting the gates open so they they could learn and expand the assets that they had we should have seen it with the way we changed from shellacked to vinyl to cassettes to cd and ever but instead of being the rational people that we were as creative people the lawyers and the financial people were saying you know when you can't do that you can listen loser whereas the industry should have really gone along and this is an exciting development and there were various people on the fringes but is it too little too late I hope not Apple in particular has had a very turbulent history so in many ways there embrace of this technology and the way that they were marketed that for me it makes a lot of sense that they would Perth and market the i Pod in the manner in which they have an i Tunes whereas music industry for many many years became kind of a stodgy conservative self-referential organization or series of organizations and conglomerates and there was really no motivation for them to change. Now there is. Just been around since 2001 and it seems right that it's close relation the i Pod It's like something floating in space to the sound of a 19th century old poem composed by Richard Strauss. I would need all the space in Stanley Kubrick's mind expanding universe to fully explain how the history of the record label has entered the 21st century because of the cute but slightly sinister little apple is put in front of you phone called them so on and because of the way the world is happily holding hands and mentally merging minds via the Internet and the way people use their mobile phones to control their line. I'm now going to talk about the future of music with representatives of mobile phone. Obviously I met Stuart supporter of digital music but I still have a vinyl collection I still have a substantial cd collection and I would still love the tangibility and product that for me were charged but I think unfortunately going forward you and I are in the minority a mobile phone must deliver something other than just voice for us to have a future it's all everybody's got a mobile phone already in this country Nobody's particularly going to buy a new file if it doesn't have new things that they're after one of those things is music which we'll head of Music and Film Development always in the u.k. And hopefully head of music stores the team Obama. Saying I. Think it's always going to keep coming I think music is a fundamental part of humanity and being human that has an incredible value to risk regardless whether anybody's paying for it and the key point there is are people paying for it is there enough money going back into the system to Spore artist up and coming I think that the way in which it's distributed is certainly changed dramatically I mean there's a fairly well accepted phrase in the digital world which says that music will become like water and what I mean by that is that music will come out of fuel come out of your t.v. It'll come out of your hi fi wherever you want to get it you can you can get hold of it what that means is that you have a fantastic amount of choice but at the same time you don't necessarily value individual songs you have such a luxury of getting everything all the time when have you needed that you don't necessarily treasure things in the same way and I think that is a fundamental change something that most of our foreign companies offer for the record industry scale the larger u.k. Mobile operators of 141516 1000000 customers you then potentially have the opportunity. To build different businesses around selling that music where the classic solution is that you get your music for free by your telephone tariff or it could be you know you buy a car which can be found with as much music as you like so it's just folded into a subscription plan exactly I mean you're looking at a generation coming up now which is not used to paying for music I say have children now is a good chance that they're not paying the same kind of money that we used to pay for music is kids and there's a good chance that they're not going to really understand even the concept of paying for music so they won't think they are paying it won't even notice Well that's the that's the whole idea is that they won't even notice you know in 3 to 5 years people will expect when they buy. To get a music service or a t.v. Set it remains to be seeing how the music is paid for it may be advertising it may be found to remove the cost of the handset is knock you down with cost if we like recently it may just be as you pay your monthly subscription that there's a portion of that which goes to the music companies. It's certainly an opportunity to sell to a bigger and wider audience I think it also offers a huge opportunity to create develop an exploit fan bases if you follow the way that particularly the 16 to 24 hours of this world the habits that are employed on their mobile phones there's certainly a huge opportunity for viral marketing and just general exploitation of fan bases and creation of foundations I think. That is. Just you know me and I have you know to compete getting better at understanding what they now need to do like definitely I mean the traditional major record label structure is changed significantly in the last 2 or 3 years at the same time there's still a legacy of cd sales contributing to their bottom line so they're not moving away as fast as we'd like them to but they're definitely heading in the right. Direction back to the mobile phone that you buy that comes with this music 3 or 4 years ago that would have scared the life out of any record company and now they're realizing actually this isn't there to the more harm that business this is actually there is a huge opportunity to maybe their business if you like. It took 30 years to get from the vinyl single an album to the compact disc 15 years to get from the cd to m p 3 and since then a constant uncontrollable acceleration towards a world where we can hear music without having it transferred onto any kind of reassuring solid object a world where record shops are disappearing by the week a world that we produce is itself by the 2nd a world where you can buy the new beyond the album is a credit card shaped piece of plastic with a special code for internet access and even as I speak the idea of downloading is heading the way of the $78.00 the 8 track cartridge the Mini Disc the compact disc single as Jerome Huxley and Richard Wheeler pragmatically predict for me it's almost already moving on from downloading something the industry as a whole is very interesting is the streaming of music you can almost access your music at any point anywhere during the day you have to ask the question that point do you actually need to be able to buy a download because if you can access streaming services for a job then there's no reason why you can't create playlists from the streaming services and then just access them from a variety of devices Ok. The ideal world so far as were concerned is what's an editable as far as we're concerned as well which is a storage cloud where you backup all of you music and you can access it where every like you. Yeah it's a fairly sort of horrible phrase but. Unfortunately that's true a storage cloud called Hal no doubt but what about. The musician in all this who is considering the relationship between the creator of the actual fabric of the store its clout the psychology of producing something special and deeply personal that then just shapeless Lee merges with the cloud and the key element of how the musician is going to be paid record labels big and small a gauging how to maintain the economic value of music in a world that increasingly takes that for granted determining new ways to distribute and market music but where the musicians fit into all this now you've no doubt noticed that in this series we've not talked to musicians just th