Music Market Audit : United Kingdom - Research Paper Example

Music Market Audit: United Kingdom Music companies percentages Competition in the United Kingdom has greatly increased. Consequently, the competition commission agreed on a deal to merge two music companies. The merger was between Columbia and RCA. This was the second attempt by the commission to merge music companies aiming to reduce competition in the United Kingdom. However, the decision was thwarted by the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT). UK businesses who provide tickets to live events sold millions of tickets to nationals.

Despite the profit made, the competition increased further which led to the conclusion that such a merger was unlikely to achieve the desired result of lessening the competition. Primarily, their goal is reducing the oversell of live music tickets to one function and distribute almost or equal number of tickets to events organized by the three label groups. Market share of Music Genres There are some new British artists in the market that have dominated the United Kingdom Charts over the recent years.

In addition to successful albums from Kaiser Chiefs and KY Tunstall, established British artists like Coldplay, Gorillaz and Oasis have greatly helped contemporary rock increase its share in the album market. Rock genre is fast becoming the nation’s favorite especially with growing popularity of home-grown British bands. British rock artists claimed 49.4% of yester year’s album sales. Hip Hop’s market share reached double figures since the introduction of modern high profile sellers like Eminem, Ja rule and Nelly.

With the release of successful albums like The Marshall Mathers LP, Dr. Dre 2001, and Country Grammar by Eminem, Dr Dre and Nelly respectively, Hip Hop has hugely connected with music consumers owning about 13% of the market (Guins, 209). Teen pop genre arose from a combination of R&B and pop idol music. This was viewed as phenomenal due to the steep rise of Teen pop fan-base. Electronic Dance sector has produced very memorable successful musicians for example Elvis and JXL. In the year 2002, Elvis and JXL produced a single that became an official theme song for the world cup.

This shows the value of their music and importance of Jazz to the people of England and Europe as a whole. Market share of Retailers Online retailers are hugely responsible for the increasing market share of different albums. They can also stock a huge range of titles for the albums to captivate customers. Online retailers merging with digital music retailers have increased the consumer choice in United Kingdom. As a result, British record labels are increasingly making huge profits. Some of the retailers that have merged include HMV, Virgin, Capital records, Tesco, Asda and Blue note (Dolores, 64).

CD’s and MP3’s in UK The 21st century has introduced new concepts in the music industry. For example, consumers are now spending less money to purchase recorded music in all formats especially in the 1990’s. Total revenues for MP3’s, CD’s and DVD have globally declined by 25% from $37 billion in 1999 to $28 billion in 2008 according to surveys done by bodies such as IFPI (Khosrowpour, 210). As a result, there have been massive layoffs in the music industry, driving retailers out of their jobs and forcing record companies, producers, studios, musicians to search for new businesses.

The main reason for the decline in sales of CD’s is on-line digital music. Thousands of songs have been uploaded on the internet and freely downloadable too. This has swayed any potential customers to download free music instead of purchasing. Works Cited Dolores A. Billboard. International News Reports. Nielsen Business Media press.15 Jan 1972. Vol. 84, No. 3 Guins R. Edited clean version: technology and the culture of control. Minnesota Press. 2008. Khosrowpour M. Cases on electronic commerce technologies and applications.

Idea Group Inc (IGI). 2006.