The music business begins with music, and the core of the music experience is the song, right? What’s being played by the musician. The song’s at the core of everything we do, and it’s important to understand exactly what a song is. A song is really just an idea. It’s a melodic idea, a rhythmic idea, a harmonic idea. Something that brings a bunch of information together and creates an incredible work of art that can be enjoyed by lots of people.
But the music business starts when that idea first needs to be distributed. For centuries, music was something that was essentially free. It was part of our culture, part of our environments. Songs and music began as oral tradition, as something passed from person to person, and from generation to generation.
The music business starts when the song, the idea, becomes something to sell and to buy. So that’s what I’m going to talk about right now. It’s important to remember that the music business actually starts before there’s anything like records or recording. It actually starts as just a piece of information on a piece of paper. That’s the first bit to learn in your music education.
As we move into the Industrial Revolution and to more contemporary times, it becomes possible not only to fix those musical ideas in form, but also to buy and to sell that form. So the form becomes a humble sheet of paper with that musical information written upon it.
Now, here’s the thing, and it’s really the key to understanding what the business of music is. How much would you pay me for a sheet of blank paper? Next to nothing, right? Because it’s worth next to nothing. Maybe fractions of a penny. It’s almost not even worth talking about because there’s nothing special about it.
Now, I’m going to put some random ink on this paper. How much would you pay me for it now? Still nothing, right? Still pretty much worth nothing. It’s just paper and meaningless ink. The random ink doesn’t really mean anything, so it’s not going to change the value of the paper.
But let’s say I were to write some specific symbols on it, something that you could interpret and understand as a piano player. Then it begins to be worth something, because there is something worth having that’s on this sheet of paper, and now it’s much more valuable. And what’s worth having is the idea, right? The idea of a song. It works the same way for books. Words on a page convey a particular kind of idea, and those ideas are worth money.
And essentially, the early music business was all about putting those ideas on paper. So this is worth more than nothing. It’s worth 50 cents, $1, $2, however much the market will bear for buying sheet music.
Now, it just so happens that the music business emerges and there becomes a market for music in the late 1800s, early 1900s, because there’s an emergent middle class who can afford to buy things like pianos. Well, if you have a piano, and you know how to play music, then you need the instructions for playing that music. So suddenly there is a market for these ideas on paper called songs.
So here’s the thing, if I’m a musician, I definitely know how to make and interpret these symbols. What I might not know, for example, is where to buy a whole bunch of paper to print songs on, or where to buy ink, or the names of all the music stores in America and the addresses so that I can distribute that stuff to them. So frankly, I’m a musician. I want to stay at my piano, I want to compose things. I don’t want to do all that other stuff. That’s when I need somebody else, I need a partner.
So if I’m a songwriter, what I really need is a song publisher. And that is the beginnings of the music business in America, so remember that as you continue your online music education. That’s the beginnings of a music business that started on 28th Street in New York City between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, and it was known by the nickname Tin Pan Alley. The reason it got that nickname is because when people would walk down the street and hear all the sounds of the pianos coming out of the windows as they walked down the street, it sounded like little plunking on tin cans, all these little percussive piano hits that blended into this cacophony of sound spilling out into the world.
Well, Tin Pan Alley is not just a place. It’s also a metaphor and a nickname for the first music business. And the first music business was about selling these ideas on paper, and it was a partnership between the artist and the businessperson, the person who knew how to write these songs and put the symbols on paper, and the person who knew how to distribute and sell them.
This is how folks began making a lot of money. They sold sheet music to music stores, and they also got money for artists performing them onstage called a performance royalty. So this was the nature of the early music business.
