1. Major vs. independent record labels.
Universal music group: (UMG) is the global music leader with strong market
positions in recorded music, music publishing, and merchandising.
The recorded music business discovers and develops recording artists and
then markets and promotes their music across a wide array of formats and
platforms. UMG's music publishing company, Universal Music Publishing
Group, discovers and develops songwriters, and owns and administers
copyrights to musical compositions for use in recordings, public
performances, and related uses, such as films and advertisements. Bravado,
UMG’s merchandising company, sells artist and music branded products via
multiple sales points including online, fashion retail, and live performances.
The Black Eyed Peas become first group to sell over 6 million US digital
downloads with “I Gotta Feeling”.
MUTE::Mute was founded by Daniel Miller in 1978, and since then has
signed and developed some of the world’s most influential recording artists –
including Depeche Mode, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Yazoo, Goldfrapp,
Erasure, Moby and Richard Hawley – and become home to a crop of
emerging talent and recent signings such as Josh T. Pearson, Big Deal, Beth
Jeans Houghton and S.C.U.M.
Whilst maintaining a firmly eclectic roster, from the earliest days of The
Normal, Fad Gadget and DAF through to the techno era with artists such as
Plastikman / Richie Hawtin and Speedy J, and to the present day with hybrid
electronic artists such as Yeasayer and S.C.U.M, the label has always been a
champion of electronic music.
Mute also looks after a catalogue of seminal electronic artists such as Can
and Cabaret Voltaire.
Mute Liberation Technologies has now been running since autumn 1994, as
an FTP site, a Telnet site and a BBS (all no longer available) and since spring
1995 as a web site. The web site was relaunched in July 2004 and the version
you are viewing now was launched in August 2011.
October 2010 saw the release of Dust Lane by the French artist Yann
Tiersen. The album incorporated vintage electronic sounds and textures
recorded over two years in France and the Philippines. In November Mute
released Einstürzende Neubauten's fourth album in the Strategies Against
Architecture series. The album continues with an archive compilation of the
band's output from 2002 to 2010.
The major company has a huge advantage over the smaller independent
companies as they have financial power to advertise and distribute their
artists material over a larger area. But smaller more independent companies
can focus more on a single genre and target audience to maximise their
output of sales
