Convergence of Technology
The coming together of new media technologies.
Eg. Television is now digital and interactive, with the potential for 1,000 channels and with technology available to download and store programmes; television can also be used for banking and shopping; internet webcams allow for visual interaction between users; music can be downloaded and burnt onto CD’s and mobile phones can take and send pictures and access to internet.
Convergence of Industrial Activity
The coming together of different industries.
Synergy
The coming together of two separate media texts in such a way as to benefit both.
Conglomerate
An international company with a wide and varied range of commercial interests.
Eg. News Corporation, with its transcontinental interest in the publishing of books, magazines and newspapers, film and television production and satellite broadcasting, is a good example.
Globalisation
The growing tendency of industrial and commercial companies to merge and operate on an international rather than a national or regional basis.
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 digital format.
Vertical Integration
The merger or takeover of companies operating at different stages of the production/distribution process. Total vertical integration gives a company control of a product from a raw materials to distribution.
Horizontal Integration
The merger of competing companies from the same line of business and involved at the same level of activity. Mergers or take-overs that would allow particular companies to dominate a government regulation.
Major Record Label
This represents the majority of the music sold making up most of the music market.
Subsidiary Label
A smaller company owned and set up by a bigger company.
Independent Label This is a record label operating without the funding of or outside the organizations of the major record labels. A great number of bands and musical acts begin on independent labels.
Niche Audience
It is a select group of people that have a very unique interest.
Mainstream Audience
The uncontroversial, generally accepted and the majority of the population.
Fans
A fan is taken to be someone who engages within a subculture organized around a specific object of study.
Active Audiences
Any of various theories of audience behaviour that see the audience as active participants in the process of decoding and making sense of the media texts.
Audiophiles - An audiophile is a person who has a great interest in high-fidelity sound reproduction. Some audiophiles are more interested in collecting and listening to music, while others are more interested in collecting and listening to audio components, whose "sound quality" they consider as important as the recorded musical performance, or even more important.
Early Adopters
An early adopter customer is an early customer of a given company, 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
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.
