Definition - Key words

Convergence of technology

• The coming together of new media technologies

Convergence of industrial activity 

• The coming together of different industries.

Synergy

• Two or more things functioning together to produce a result not independently possible.

Conglomerate

• A combination of two or more corporations from entirely different businesses that fall under the same structure.

Globalisation 

• Growth to a global or worldwide scale

Analogue music

• Measuring or representing data by means of one or more physical properties that can express any value along a continuous scale

Digitalisation

• The process of converting information into a digital format.

Vertical integration

• The combination of two or more stages of production normally operated by separate companies.

Horizontal integration

• Strategy to increase the businesses market share by taking over a similar company.

Major record label

• The music industry (or music business) sells compositions recoding and performances of music.

Subsidiary label

• Smaller companies operating under the larger corporations.

Niche Audience

• The niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing. The market niche defines the product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs as well as the price range, production quality and the demographics that is intended to impact.

Mainstream audience

• Mainstream is generally the common current of any thought of the majority. A mainstream audience is the type of music that the majority of people like.

Fans

• A person who has a strong interest in or admiration for a particular sport, art or entertainment form or famous person.

Active audiences

• Audience members who are already interested in an organization, issue or cause. Instead of waiting to receive information on it they seek it out from many sources and when doing so they speak as well as listen.

Audiophiles

• A person with an interest in high quality sound reproduction and its associated technology.

Early Adopter

• An early adopter or lighthouse customer is an early customer of a given company, product, or technology; in politics, fashion, art, and other fields, this person would be referred to as a trendsetter

Consumption

• The act or process of consuming
• The using up of goods and services by consumer purchasing or int he production of other goods

Web 2.0

• The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web.
• A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumers) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumers) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them.
• Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups and folksonomies.

Meta-Tags

• This is a special HTML tag that is used to store information about a Web page but is not displayed in a Web browser. For example, meta tags provide information such as what program was used to create the page, a description of the page, and keywords that are relevant to the page. Many search engines use the information stored in meta tags when they index Web pages.

Personalisation

• made for or directed or adjusted to a particular individual

Download

• A music download is the transferral of music from an Internet-facing computer or website to a user's local computer. This term encompasses both legal downloads and downloads of copyright material without permission or payment

Streaming

• Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a streaming provider.The name refers to the delivery method of the medium rather than to the medium itself.

Peer to peer

• Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. They are said to form a peer-to-peer network of nodes

Piracy

• Music piracy is defined as the illegal copying, downloading, or selling of copyrighted music. This is an act punishable by fines or even imprisonment.

Portability

• Software been easy to take around to different places

Miniaturization

• Act of making on a greatly reduced scale.

Multitrack

• Having, using, or produced with multiple recording tracks: a multitrack tape recorder

Sampling

• In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a different sound recording of a song or piece.

DAW (Digital audio workstation)

• A digital audio workstation (DAW) is an electronic system designed solely or primarily for recording, editing and playing back digital audio. DAWs were originally tape-less, microprocessor-based systems such as the Synclavier and Fairlight CMI. Modern DAWs are software running on computers with audio interface hardware.

A&R (Artists and repertoire)

• Artists and repertoire (A&R) is the division of a record label that is responsible for talent scouting and overseeing the artistic development of recording artists. It also acts as a liaison between artists and the record label.

Record deal

• A recording contract (commonly called a record deal) is a legal agreement between a record label and a recording artist (or group), where the artist makes a record (or series of records) for the label to sell and promote. Artists under contract are normally only allowed to record for that label exclusively; guest appearances on other artists' records will carry a notice "By courtesy of (the name of the label)", and that label may receive a percentage of sales.

Royalties

• Unlike other forms of intellectual property, music royalties have a strong linkage to individuals – composers (score), songwriters (lyrics) and writers of musical plays – in that they can own the exclusive copyright to created music and can license it for performance independent of corporates. Recording companies and the performing artists that create a "sound recording" of the music enjoy a separate set of copyrights and royalties from the sale of recordings and from their digital transmission (depending on national laws).

Distribution

• The act of sharing something out among a number of recipients
• The way in which somehting is shared out among a group or spread over an area

Musical Distribution is how albums get into shops. Distribution companies sign deals with record labels (or very rarely, directly with artists) that gives them the right to sell that label's products to record stores that have an account with that distributor. The distributor takes a cut of income from each album sold and then pays the label the remaining balance.

Marketing

• The action or business of promoting and selling products or services
• Music Marketing is a term that describes a technique in which a brand promotes its products and services to consumers through the use of musicians, endorsements, concert tours, festivals, events, and other similar tactics within the music industry.