A major label is a record label that has it’s own in-house team of distributers, PRs, marketers, social media managers and publicists.

A&R (Artists & Repertoire) – Responsible for developing talent and scouting talent

Distributers – Makes deals with record labels which gives them the right to sell their music at stores

Publicists – Manage the public image of the label’s artists and arranges interviews or press conferences

Intellectual Property are intangible property that is the result of creativity, such as patents, copyrights, music, etc

Protect things that are not tangible but valued. More of an expression that

Publishing Companies

PRS (Performing Rights Society) is a royalties collection agencies that collects when its members’ works are performed or communicated to the public

PRS members get paid every 6 months

Copyright of a musical work begins automatically once a piece of music is created and documented or recorded. In the UK, this is detailed in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Led Zeppelin Vs. Muddy Waters Case:

In 1985 Willie Dixon sued Led Zeppelin, accusing them of ripping-off from “You Need Love” by Muddy Waters, written by himself. The words “You need love” is a constantly repeated line which occurs in both tracks with a almost identical guitar riff, “You Need Love” was released in 1962 and “Whole Lotta Love” in 1969. The lawsuit was settled out of court to Willie Dixon for an undisclosed amount.

Muddy Waters – You Need Love

Led Zeppelin – Whole Lotta Love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mln0RciE2o0

Sources:

Record Label Job Roles

Director of A&R
A&R Coordinator
A&R Administrator
General Manager
Promotion Manger
Promotion Staffer
Director of Publicity
Staff Publicists
Artists Relations and Development Representative
Album Cover Designer
Licensing Representative
Sales and Marketing Manager
Marketing Coordinator
Music Marketing Representative
Consumer Researcher
Record Industry Advertising Account Executive
Record Company Salesperson
Field Merchandiser
Music Intern
Campus Representative
Social Media Manager
Music Web Designer
Website Marketing Manager

The History of Jamaican Music Culture

1950 – Present

Calypso

Calypso is a style of Afro-Caribbean music that started in Trinidad and Tobago amid the start to mid-19th century and in the long run spread to the rest of the Caribbean islands and Venezuela by the mid-20th century. Calypso music was produced in Trinidad in the 17th century from the West African Kaiso and canboulay music conveyed by African slaves imported to that Caribbean island to deal with sugar plantations. The slaves, conveyed to work on sugar manors, were deprived of all associations with their country and family and not permitted to converse with one another. They utilized calypso to deride the slave masters and to speak with one another. Numerous early calypsos were sung in French Creole by an individual called a griot.

Notable Songs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUAY2O4Lwxo

Mento

Mento is a style of Jamaican society music that originates before and has enormously impacted ska and reggae music. Mento normally includes acoustic instruments, such as acoustic guitar, banjo, hand drums, and the rhumba box. Mento is frequently mistaken for calypso, despite the fact that the two offer numerous likenesses, they are discrete and particular melodic structures.

Notable Songs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-jTgEY4-7E

Ska

Ska is a music genre that commenced in Jamaica in the late 1950s and was the forerunner to rocksteady and reggae. Ska joined components of Caribbean mento and calypso with American jazz and rhythm and blues. It is depicted by a walking bass line accent with rhythms on the off-beat. Ska grew in Jamaica during the 1960s when Prince Buster, Clement “Coxsone” Dodd, and Duke Reid shaped sound systems to play American R&B and afterward started composing their own music.

Music writers regularly isolate the historical backdrop of ska into three periods: the first Jamaican scene of the 1960s; the 2 Tone ska recovery of the late 1970s in Britain, which intertwined Jamaican ska rhythms and melodies with the quicker pace and harder edge of punk shake; and the third wave ska, which included groups from the UK.

Notable Songs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbqiCxEIeEo

Rocksteady

Rocksteady is a music type that begun in Jamaica around the mid 1960s. A successor of ska and a pioneer to reggae, rocksteady was the predominant style of music in Jamaica for about two years, performed by numerous musicians who built up the reggae genre. Jamaica, as with ska, anchoring the global base reggae music has today. Jamaica, as with ska, anchoring the universal base reggae music has today.

Rocksteady, significantly more so the early reggae that pursued, was worked around the “one drop” drum beat, described by an heavy accent on the third beat of each bar. This varies extraordinarily from the drumming styles in R&B and rock and roll which put the bass drum on the principal beat (the downbeat) and never on the second and fourth beat.

Notable Songs:

Reggae

Reggae is a music genre that begun in Jamaica in the late 1960s. The term means the modern popular music of Jamaica and its diaspora. A 1968 single by Toots and the Maytals, “Do the Reggay” was the main prominent song to utilize “reggae,” adequately naming the genre and acquainting it with a worldwide audience. While once in a while utilized in a wide sense to allude to most sorts of mainstream Jamaican dance music, the term reggae all the more appropriately signifies a specific music style that was firmly affected by conventional mento and additionally American jazz and R&B. Reggae for the most part relates news, social conversations and political commentary.

Notable Songs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT4iJ2jZv7M

Dub

Dub is a genre of music that became out of reggae during the 1960s, and is generally considered a subgenre, however it has happened to reach out past the extent of reggae. Music in this style comprises dominatingly of instrumental remixes of existing recordings and is accomplished by fundamentally controlling and reshaping the recordings, more often than not by expelling the vocals from a current piece of music, and stressing the drum and bass parts (this stripped-down track is now and then alluded to as a riddim).

Notable Songs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frB_I5hxcdc

Soca

Soca music known as the “Spirit Of Calypso” is a sort of music that began inside a minimized subculture in Trinidad and Tobago in the mid 1970s, and formed into a scope of styles by the 1980s and later. Soca was at first created by Lord Shorty in the mid 1970s with an end goal to resuscitate conventional calypso, the prominence of which had been hailing among more youthful ages in Trinidad by the beginning of the 1970s because of the ascent in fame of reggae from Jamaica and soul and funk from USA.

Notable Songs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_P7xtZwqSk

Lovers Rock

Lovers Rock is a style of reggae music notable for its sentimental sound and substance. While love songs had been an imperative piece of reggae since the late 1960s, the style was given a more prominent concentration and a name in London in the mid-1970s.

Notable Songs:

Dancehall

Dancehall is a genre of Jamaican popular music that began in the late 1970s. Initially, dancehall was a more meagre variant of reggae than the roots style, which had ruled a great part of the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, advanced instrumentation turned out to be progressively common, changing the sound extensively, with computerized dancehall winding up progressively portrayed by quicker rhythms. Key components of dancehall music incorporate its broad utilization of Jamaican Patois as opposed to Jamaican standard English and a focal point on the track instrumentals.

During the 2000s, dancehall experienced overall dominant achievement, and by the 2010s, it started to intensely impact the sound by Western artists and producers, which has promote the genre into the Western music standard.

Notable Songs:

Essay:

Island Records is a Jamaican record label founded on July 4th 1959. In 1964 “My Boy Lollipop”, by Island Records artist Millie Small, was marked the first accomplishment in the UK and prompted a world tour. Founder of Island Records Chris Blackwell moved to England in May 1962 to assemble more attention as a result of the Jamaican sound systems turned out to be strongly rewarding. Most of the artist who had signed to Chris Blackwell’s label while he was in Jamaica consented to release their music in the UK. While in England, Blackwell went all through the city conveying his stock with him and sold to record stores in the city. He didn’t lend any copies to radio stations, as they would not play any of the Island artists. In 1989 the company was sold to PolyGram for $300 Million. Island Records helped broadcast the new genre “Reggae” worldwide, through this helped break a superstar to become Bob Marley. Bob Marley has sold 75 million albums and a barrier breaking artist who blended his compositions with ska, reggae and rocksteady.

To create a successful record label you need a roster that works on particular operations to keep the label accomplished. Island Records has several departments that benefit their artists to reach their highest potential such as A&R, sales, marketing and promotion, brands, publicity, product management, production, manufacturing, distribution, finance, business and legal affairs, international and publishing departments.

The A&Rs are in charge of finding new talent to sign to the label, establish the artists creative and recording capacities, and oversee the production process. A&R reps are inventive, have an exceptionally solid comprehension of music structure, production, the present music scene, and a much more grounded understanding of what will move in the present commercial marketplace.

After musicians ink a contract with a record label, the A&R rep remains engaged with the connection between the label and the artists. For instance, the A&R rep will encourage things like setting up the development and booking recording sessions where required.

Record label Marketing Representative’s principle duty is to create techniques and strategies to market and move the record label’s albums. The Marketing Representative may work locally or regionally. Locally, a Marketing Representative will administer specific regional markets (like a specific city), while a Regional Representative will direct a whole area (like a section of a country).

So as to effectively showcase albums, the Marketing Representative must work intimately with the Director of Marketing to plan and execute techniques. This will incorporate conveying and setting up promotional displays and creating radio station giveaway challenges. A well known system includes an advancement between a radio station and record store; where the Artist shows up at record stores while the radio station gives away that artists’s album.

The Marketing Representative is also liable of calling as well as visiting record stores in a certain territory to guarantee the stores have enough items available to stay aware of interest. This is particularly essential subsequent to something like a positive album review, award show, or a concert. The Marketing Representative also assembles album sales reports from the different stores in a specific market and will at that point pass these sales numbers along to radio and TV stations and others in the business.

A Record Company Salesperson is in charge of finishing offers of the label’s CDs, DVDs, and recordings. To make a deal, the Salesperson visits accounts, makes phone calls and sends out letters and other guarantee. Records incorporate retail stores, one-stops, and online settings. To keep accounts fulfilled and so as to make deals and meet quantities, the Salesperson should always visit his or her accounts. So as to look after validity, the Salesperson should also have a full comprehension of the label’s catalog. This incorporates every new discharge, alongside recently discharged albums that could be re-released on CD.

A common day requires a Salesperson to visit various diverse accounts, and certain days may just include making up for lost time with correspondence as well as telephone work. Contingent upon the extent of the record label, the Salesperson may also be solicited to take record store stock from CDs and recordings, while proposing which items should be requested and setting up promotion showcases. A Salesperson’s activity isn’t finished once a deal is made, as a decent Salesperson follows up to ensure orders were received and satisfied as guaranteed.

Island Records has been in charge of breaking tremendous dominant acts, for example, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, Ariana Grande, Post Malone and many more. During that time of experience Island Records had the ability to create a formula to make their artists achieve mainstream pop success, from 1959 to this present day they can influence artists to interface with their buyers which elevates their brand and business. Throughout the years there has been new pieces to the puzzle, such as, streaming and social media which is by the present standard similarly as significant as album sales since technology is a much more instantaneous route for music acts to fabricate a bridge to their fanbase.

Production Song:

https://soundcloud.com/user-39100646/bashment-beat

Led Zeppelin Vs. Muddy Waters Case:

The History of Jamaican Music Culture

Calypso

Mento

Ska

Rocksteady

Reggae

Dub

Soca

Lovers Rock

Dancehall

Essay:

Production Song:

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