The recording industry has been a major focus of interest for cultural commentators throughout the twenty-first century. As the first major content industry to have its production and distribution patterns radically disturbed by the internet, the recording industry’s content, attitudes and practices have regularly been under the microscope. Much of this discussion, however, is dominated by US and UK perspectives and assumes the ‘the recording industry’ to be a relatively static, homogeneous, entity. This book attempts to offer a broader, less Anglocentric and more dynamic understanding of the recording industry. It starting premise is the idea that the recording industry is not one thing but is, rather, a series of recording industries, locally organised and locally focused, both structured by and structuring the international industry. Seven detailed case studies of different national recording industries illustrate this fact, each of them specifically chosen to provide a distinctive insight into the workings of the recording industry. The expert contributions to this book provide the reader with a sense of the history, structure and contemporary dynamics of the recording industry in these specific territories, and counteract the Anglo-American bias of coverage of the music industry. The International Recording Industrieswill be valuable to students and scholars of sociology, cultural studies, media studies, cultural economics and popular music studies.

Home recording technologies allow today's consumer to make near-perfect copies of recorded music, television shows, movies, and other copyrighted works for private use at home. With the advance of digital recording equipment, consumers will be able to reproduce these copyrighted works with even greater accuracy. This is an issue of great concern for copyright owners, who claim that home copying is detrimental to their sales. This report presents an examination of home recording technologies and their relationship to the legal status of home copying, a comparison of the economic effects that home audiotaping may have on the recording industry with the effects that restricting home taping might have on consumers, a discussion of legal action that Congress or the industry may initiate, and the results of a national survey of home taping and copying behavior. The report is divided into seven chapters: (1) Summary, Issues, and Options; (2) Technological Change and Home Copying; (3) Legal Aspects of Copyright and Home Copying; (4) An Overview of the U.S. Record Industry; (5) Copyright Royalties for Music and Sound Recording; (6) The OTA (Office of Technology Assessment) Survey; and (7) Economic Perspectives on Home Copying. Appendixes contain a description of the survey development and review, a copy of the survey questionnaire, OTA survey tables, and a list of contractor reports related to the study. (MAB)

Vols. for 1975- include publications cataloged by the Research Libraries of the New York Public Library with additional entries from the Library of Congress MARC tapes.