From Acorns… How to build your brilliant business from scratch
Caspian Woods
The title of this book gives a clear indication of the themes inside. This book is a beginners manual to starting up your own business in from the very basics like how to be an entrepreneur. One can tell that it is marketed to a British audience for people looking to be self-employed. The book doesn’t focus on a specific career path like music but has a broad overview of knowledge that can be put into near enough any business idea. It covers topics like financing, how to get financial support through grants and loans, pricing yourself and the legal side of things like taxes. It covers the different types of business owners and entrepreneurs there are, as there are many ways to run a successful business. Depending on which entrepreneur someone would prefer to work as, it will set a vague plan of how your business and lifestyle will work. A successful business is done through smart decision making and being clear on what type of business and company you actually are. Being your own boss means that you get to call the shots on how you want to live, run and build your business.
It discusses throughout how one can grow their business diversely to create more sales through maybe hiring staff and polishing your business plan. It also shows how to deal with failure, which is something a lot of people may struggle within this competitive industry.
The book finishes with useful sources and information like websites, addresses and phone numbers that someone looking to create a business may find useful.
Retromania
Simon Reynolds
Retromania is all about the history and future of pop culture. The book expands on the idea that music can no longer be original as it has already been done. It is written in three parts: Part One: ‘Now’, Part Two: ‘Then’ and Part Three: ‘Tomorrow’.
Part One ‘Now’ is about our current situation as part of the music industry. It discusses online platforms as our current main means of music consumption. The chapters progress to talk about mainstream online music entertainment like Youtube, the third most visited website on the planet, and how pop music is and will keep repeating itself.
Part Two ‘Then’ talks about the historical music trends and eras in relation to our present day. The section covers previous trends of musicians in the commercial music scene throughout time, including interesting fashion trends and musical stylistic designs of music magazines and packaging.
Part Three: Tomorrow is the final section, discussing sampling, analog, and digital recording. It discusses their differences of how analog is physical waveforms printed onto a film, tape or vinyl and digital recording are computerized data and waveforms on a computer to be exported onto a disk or distributed online.
It quotes ‘If contemporary pop culture is addicted to its own past, I belong to a minority of future addicts’. The book has a modern look on current British pop culture from a perspective of Simon Reynolds, who was a ‘teenager in the post-punk seventies’. Bands like The Cure, The Smiths, New Order, Gary Numan and The Jam were popular and upcoming at that time and you can see throughout the book how he references the modern music industry to this era a lot of the time and how we have developed ideas from to make the current pop industry we know so well today. He also talks about British museums and music press such as NME, Sounds in part one in relation to today and the past commercial music trends.
https://rateyourmusic.com/list/toshhh/top_new_wave_post_punk_bands_late_70s_and_80s/
The Music Management Bible
Nicola Riches
The Music Management Bible is an informative book that covers lots of sides of the music industry from a manager and music artists perspective. Every chapter of this book has the information necessary to both parties in order to run their business in a professional, educated and smart way. The music industry has so many layers to it that it is important to know the ins and outs of such a complex industry. It discusses the most important and relevant parts of the industry to help managers and musicians gain the knowledge to create a realistic, sustainable career by covering legal agreements like PRS, contacts and insurance, the vast amount of roles in the industry and how to approach them, agreements between management companies, recording with producers, PR, press, and publishers. It also covers chapters on marketing and digital distribution as our music industry is heading towards being completely digital.
It also has sections on working in band situations. When involving multiple people in music, like in a band situation, it is important that there are rules in place regarding a range of things like legalities like who owns what and money management. The book informs bands how to keep fairness and professionalism including contract agreements, being professional when sound checking and going on stage to how to sell merchandise in a successful way, treating your brand as a shop.
Like the ‘From Acorns… how to build your brilliant business from scratch’, it is a British book, covering the way that the British music industry works. The book ends with useful organisations and publications, including phone numbers and addresses, mainly in London.
The Music Business and Recording Industry: Delivering Music in the 21st Century
By Geoffrey P. Hull, Thomas William Hutchison, Richard Strasser
Like my first chosen text, this book focuses on growing a business and creating streams of income from music. The book was published in New York and the UK, making the demographic a global audience, relevant to pretty much anyone in the music industry. It is mainly focused on the three income streams in the music industry: music publishing, live entertainment, and recordings. It covers the changes in the industry brought about by the digital age, such as changing methods of distributing and accessing music and new approaches in marketing with the Internet and mobile applications. New developments in copyright law are also examined, along with the global and regional differences in the music business.
Within the chapters, it goes into detail explaining different areas of copyright, publishing music, live shows and marketing. It helps musicians focus their product and how to price themselves accordingly.
Jazzy Heath UOG 