Book Title: Pay for Play: How the Music Industry Works, Where the Money Goes, and Why

Book Description

I have organized this book in four parts, each of which is divided into multiple chapters. The first part concerns the history and structure of the music industry. Understanding the music industry as it exists today requires an understanding of how it developed over time. Today’s music industry would most certainly not be the one anybody would design from scratch. It has many inefficiencies and quirks that reflect the economic pressures and musical concerns of bygone ages.

The second part of the book provides an overview of copyright law and the ways it interacts with music. Nearly every aspect of the music industry is thoroughly infused with the reward structure governed by copyright law. Nearly every dollar that flows from consumer to artist in the music industry is parsed out, divided, and contested in accordance with the system of rights and obligations the flow from copyright protections. One could even make a convincing argument that the very form of popular music (length of songs, cyclical structures, prevalence of cover songs, etc.) is highly influenced by the reward structure imposed by copyright law.

The third and fourth parts of the book deal with the issues surrounding infringement of copyrights. One of the fundamental and least understood aspects of music copyright is that there are two separate music copyrights: one involving the musical work (or “song”) and one that involving a recording of that musical work (often called the “master right”).

There are several aspects of the music industry that are not covered in depth in this book, and that is by design. The breadth and depth of this book is governed primarily by the purpose it is intended to serve — as a textbook for a 10-week undergraduate course. Additional breadth or depth would introduce material that I do not believe could be reasonably included in the course as I currently teach it. In my experience, there simply is not enough time to cover more material in that time than is in this text.