Music Reference Services Quarterly

ISSN: 1058-8167 (Print) 1540-9503 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wmus20

Takin’ Care of Business: Music Business Reference

Marci Cohen & Grover Baker

To cite this article: Marci Cohen & Grover Baker (2015) Takin’ Care of Business:
Music Business Reference, Music Reference Services Quarterly, 18:3-4, 157-163, DOI:
10.1080/10588167.2015.1091691

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10588167.2015.1091691

Published online: 14 Dec 2015.

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 Music Reference Services Quarterly, 18:157–163, 2015
Published with license by Taylor & Francis
ISSN: 1058-8167 print/1540-9503 online
DOI: 10.1080/10588167.2015.1091691

Takin’ Care of Business:

Music Business Reference
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MARCI COHEN
Stan Getz Library, Berklee College of Music, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

GROVER BAKER
James E. Walker Library, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, USA

Whether supporting scholarly or more profit-driven research,

librarians need to provide reference services on music business.
A variety of sources support this process: music databases to which
most music libraries subscribe; business databases to which their
institution may already have access; specialized databases aimed
at the academic and/or professional markets; free resources on the
Web; and print books, directories, and periodicals. Understanding
the techniques to make the most of these tools and their limitations
will help librarians tackle the toughest music business reference
questions.

KEYWORDS music business, music industry

INTRODUCTION: “TAKIN’ CARE OF BUSINESS” AND

BACHMAN-TURNER OVERDRIVE

“Takin’ Care of Business” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive (BTO) was only

intended as an album track, but demand due to radio airplay led to its
release as a single.1 It entered the U.S. singles charts on May 18, 1974, peak-
ing at No. 12 on August 9. The band was at the height of its popularity
in October 1974 when three of its albums were in the Billboard album
chart. The single never hit 500,000 in sales, but the album on which it
first appeared, Bachman-Turner Overdrive II, was certified gold, and the

© Marci Cohen and Grover Baker

Received: 2 July 2015; Revised: 19 August 2015; Accepted 19 August 2015.
Address correspondence to Marci Cohen, Berklee College of Music, 1140 Boylston St.
MS-150-LIB, Boston, MA 02215, USA. E-mail: mcohen2@berklee.edu

157
 158 Marci Cohen and Grover Baker

band’s 1976 compilation that included the track, The Best of BTO (So Far),
reached platinum, certifying sales of one million copies. In their native
Canada, both albums achieved platinum, certifying sales of 100,000 each.
Randy Bachman, the band’s guitarist and vocalist and composer of the track,
claims that the song “remains the most licensed song in Sony Music’s vast
publishing catalogue and has been used in everything from movies to sell-
ing burgers and office supplies.”2 Although BTO is inactive, Bachman and
Fred Turner still tour under the name Bachman & Turner, represented by
Paquin Artists Agency and managed by Paquin Entertainment Group, with
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offices in Toronto and Winnipeg in Canada and Los Angeles, California. And
if you are so inclined, you can catch Randy on Royal Caribbean Cruise Line’s
Independence of the Seas, sailing out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for their
“Rock Legends Cruise,” January 21–25, 2016.
Why does this matter? Because these facts are the realm of music busi-
ness reference. And as Billboard noted in its report on music business
education, “A growing number of colleges, universities and other educa-
tional institutions are giving students the opportunity to learn about the
music business with hands-on experience and classes taught by teachers
from the industry. And those schools are increasingly responding to the
changes shaping both education and the music business.”3
To demonstrate this with current numbers, the Directory of Music
Business Degrees provides details for eighty-four undergraduate and four-
teen graduate music business degree programs in the United States.4 Middle
Tennessee State University (MTSU), located thirty-five miles southeast of
Nashville in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, is one such institution. With an under-
graduate enrollment of 22,729, MTSU offers students the opportunity to
major in the music industry through two departments. The Department of
Recording Industry is one of the oldest music business programs in the
nation, having been established in 1973. The university’s 2014 Fact Book
shows 1,128 students majoring in Recording Industry during the fall semester
of 2014, making it the second largest program at MTSU, trailing only Nursing,
which boasts 1,154 majors. An additional 34 graduate students are enrolled
in the Master of Fine Arts in Recording Arts and Technologies program. The
School of Music at MTSU also offers a concentration in Music Industry. Of the
360 music majors, more than one-third of them (128) are concentrating on
the Music Industry.5
In addition to faculty research and students doing course-related assign-
ments, music libraries are supporting budding professionals who must learn
to fend for themselves in an increasing entrepreneurial music environment.
“Current music business students must focus on acquiring the knowledge
to build their own DIY businesses and opportunities rather than seeking
employment with one of few remaining major labels,”6 says Don Gorder,
chair of Berklee College of Music’s music business/management department.
All this can sound daunting if you are more accustomed to helping under-
graduates research program notes or faculty find descriptions of 18th century
 Music Business Reference 159

Italian opera performances. But you can accomplish a lot with the resources
to which you already have access supplemented by others that meet the
extent of your institution’s needs.

PRINT MATERIALS
Books
The traditional view of reference services is a set of books that compile
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listings of facts, and this is an obvious starting point for music business ref-
erence. A familiar reference publisher in this field is Joel Whitburn’s Record
Research, which has produced many books compiling Billboard chart list-
ings. His volumes cover albums and singles across decades. He has also
compiled specialty charts such as Christmas music and dance/disco tracks.
Other sources are more specialized. The Music Business Contract Library
by Greg Forest (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 2008) is a book with a CD-
ROM of forms, such as a booking agreement contract and a recording budget
spreadsheet. The forms can be photocopied from the book or copied from
the CD-ROM as PDFs or as editable documents in Microsoft Word or Excel.
Now in its fourth edition, The Musician’s Business and Legal Guide, com-
piled and edited by Mark Halloran (Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall,
2008), covers a wide range of basic issues such as intellectual property rights
for compositions and band names, management agreements, and record-
ing contracts. IFPI’s Recording Industry in Numbers is an annual report of
recorded media sales from around the world, with a general overview and
detailed pages by country. While the report is not cheap, IFPI does offer
an academic pricing package. The Music Business Registry (http://www.
musicregistry.com) sells directories of contacts, including its A&R Registry,
the Film & Television Music Guide, the Music Publisher Registry, and the
Music Attorney, Legal and Business Affairs Guide.
Moving from reference materials to more narrative resources, company
histories, especially those devoted to record labels, offer a trove of infor-
mation. They are frequently aimed at the consumer market and are lushly
illustrated. Examples include Def Jam Recordings: The First 25 Years of the
Last Great Record Label (New York: Rizzoli, 2011) and Becoming Elektra:
The True Story of Jac Holzman’s Visionary Record Label by Mick Houghton
(London: Jawbone, 2010). The coverage for this type of book ranges from
major labels with a rich history across genres to specialty labels that pinpoint
a locale or musical style.
In a similar vein are executive biographies including memoirs. Some
profiles are of people who built a single business, such as Sun King: The
Life and Times of Sam Phillips, The Man Behind Sun Records by Kevin and
Tanja Crouch (London: Piatkus, 2008), but others had careers that spanned
several companies, such as Clive Davis, who has written two books about
 160 Marci Cohen and Grover Baker

leaving his mark on both Columbia and Arista Records. While record com-
pany executives are the most obvious example of this book genre, one can
also find autobiographies of concert promoter Bill Graham, jazz impresario
George Wein, and Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, for exam-
ple. Recording engineers and producers are not excluded. For example, Ken
Scott’s Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust: Off the Record with the Beatles, Bowie,
Elton & So Much More (Los Angeles: Alfred Music, 2012) provides anecdotes
and details of the techniques he used while working on classic albums such
as Magical Mystery Tour, The White Album, and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy
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Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

Journals and Magazines

A handful of trade magazines cover the music industry. Billboard is the bible
of the U.S. music business, covering all aspects, although it is most famous for
its sales charts. Pollstar focuses on the worldwide concert and touring busi-
ness; a subscription includes its Booking Agency Directory, Concert Venue
Directory, Concert Support Services Directory, and Talent Buyer Directory. Its
Record Company Directory and Artist Management Directory must be pur-
chased individually. Music Row concentrates on the Nashville-based industry,
while Music Trades specializes in the musical instrument business. Finally,
Music Week deals with Europe as the UK equivalent of Billboard.
Because the music industry is an industry, it is covered in general busi-
ness magazines. For example, Bloomberg Business Week ran the article “The
Song Remains Pretty Similar”7 about allegations that Led Zeppelin lifted the
opening of “Stairway to Heaven” from another band. It includes a calculation
of how much money Led Zeppelin has made from the song and a sidebar on
similar accusations of the band and the outcomes. Forbes did a 2012 cover
story on Spotify’s Daniel Ek, dubbing him “The Most Important Man in
Music.”8 The Economist and Fortune also cover music as a business topic.

ONLINE RESOURCES

While there are specialized databases that support music business reference,
you can do quite a bit with the databases to which your institution already
has access, starting with standard music databases, such as Oxford Music
Online (which includes Grove Music Online), the Music Index, and the
International Index to Music Periodicals. In article databases, go beyond sub-
ject searching to search for companies or people as subjects for more precise
results. IIMP classifies bands as companies/organizations, while the Music
Index indexes them as people. For historical research from primary sources,
ProQuest’s Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive contains cover-to-cover
scans with full-text searching of periodicals about music and broadcasting
from 1880 to 2000. As a general strategy in journal databases, if you are
 Music Business Reference 161

looking specifically for a broad overview of a company, try searching for

articles commemorating the company’s anniversary or obituaries of founders
or other key executives, because these types of pieces frequently include
such summaries.
If you are part of a larger university with a business department, your
institution probably subscribes to business databases, or you may have
access to one through a statewide contract. These resources have jour-
nal articles, but some also include press releases or MarketLine reports,
which have extensive documentation about public companies and industry
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overviews, although the latter are not necessarily updated frequently. The
major database providers have business database product lines with more or
less extensive coverage options. ProQuest produces ABI Inform, EBSCO has
Business Source, and Gale has Business Insights. As with music databases,
band names may be indexed as people or companies/organizations. Be sure
to take advantage of advanced features and recognize the strengths and
weaknesses of each resource. For example, Business Source has subject
indexing for company names, which is useful for companies like The
Orchard, which have commonplace words, but Business Insights has pro-
files of privately-held companies and concise company histories. You can
also find market share reports in these databases, although it is frequently
material that has been reported to the press rather than from market research
firms directly, so you cannot always count on finding the same report from
year to year. Services such as eMarketer and Statista provide current statis-
tics, data, analysis, and reports for all industries, including music, and they
make their information easy to incorporate into papers and presentations
by providing it in a variety of formats, such as PowerPoint slides, Excel
spreadsheets, JPEGs, and PDFs.
Specialized music online resources are also useful. Music Industry Data
provides sales charts from around the world for albums and singles. It is
searchable by artist, title, or date, and it facilitates custom graphs that can be
exported. [Disclaimer: Author Cohen is on the library advisory board for this
product.] The Audio Engineering Society (AES) Library contains thousands
of fully searchable PDF files documenting the progression of audio research
from 1953 to the present day. AES also sells its oral history DVDs, created
by the AES Historical Committee, to preserve for future generations the rec-
ollections of persons involved with important audio engineering inventions
and/or events.
Some resources are aimed at the professional rather than the academic
market, which means that licensing restrictions may severely restrict access
and they may not be set up for institutional access with proxy authen-
tication, which is commonplace with academic services. Record Research
MusicVault is produced by Joel Whitburn, who publishes the Billboard chart
books mentioned above. Unlike Music Industry Data, it does not include
international coverage but does have data from the Billboard specialty charts
such as R&B Albums and Country Singles, with data reaching back to 1890.
 162 Marci Cohen and Grover Baker

However, it is set up for only a single user name and password, and sub-
scriptions are for a fixed number of searches rather than on an annual basis.
Despite these inconveniences, for some institutions this pricing plan and
arrangement may be preferable to shelves and shelves of reference books.
PollstarPro provides online, searchable access to its print content, such as
concert news, tour histories, artist and venue availabilities, and contact direc-
tories. Its box office rankings are reported in Billboard, but this content is not
otherwise available online in journal databases. PollstarPro is also set up for a
single user and password. Celebrity Access provides similar contact informa-
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tion, including performance fee ranges and artist availability. Subscriptions

are available at single user and three user pricing.
SoundScan by Nielsen is the only source for actual sales, rather than
rank, of recorded music, but it may be prohibitively expensive for most insti-
tutions. Sales figures are sometimes reported in the press anecdotally, such
as the top-selling album of the year or Missy Elliott’s sales bump after appear-
ing on the Super Bowl halftime show, but SoundScan is the only place to
find such numbers for every release. However, because the Billboard charts
show how a release performed relative to others, that information may be
more useful than the number of units shifted. A broader view of the over-
all state of the recording industry can be found in RIAA Shipment Statistics.
The RIAA describes it as “year-end statistics. Users can view, compare, and
export historical year-end U.S. shipment statistics, including expanded access
to historical data going back to 1973.”
Do not overlook free resources available on the Web. Billboard.com has
sales charts and news articles. Google Books (books.google.com) has old
issues of Billboard, although it can be difficult to search with great preci-
sion. The resource can be particularly useful when finding specific citations
without full text in subscription databases rather than attempting full-text
searching within Google Books. There are also gaps in the coverage; whole
issues are missing, and some scans are of torn pages. On AllMusic.com,
look at the “Awards” tab for an artist or particular release to find the peak
position on the Billboard album, single, and specialty charts. The RIAA.com
Gold & Platinum database (http://www.riaa.com/goldandplatinumdata.php)
documents single and album sales of at least 500,000. Be aware that the
search interface is finicky: keyword is overly broad, retrieving any release
with any keyword, although it does provide tags as facets for limiting search
results by just one criterion. Advanced search is overly precise, requiring an
exact match, such as “Beatles, The,” not “Beatles.” For very popular artists,
it may be easiest to only search for the most distinctive words with unam-
biguous spelling to get focused results, such as “Exile Main” to find Exile
on Main St. by the Rolling Stones. Check the release date against when the
awards categories were instated; multi-platinum awards started in the mid-
1980s, so something that sold 5 million copies before then may only be
listed as platinum. In addition, record companies must pay for releases to be
certified and may choose not to do so. For international sales, look for the
 Music Business Reference 163

analogous organizations in other countries, being careful to check the sales

threshold for each certification, which may change over time and which gen-
erally reflects the size of the music market in that country. While the volume
of information can make it difficult to sift through, social media accounts for
artists, executives, and companies may be a fruitful source of information.
Finally, a convenient way to keep abreast of music industry trends is
with Sound Opinions, a syndicated public radio talk and podcast produced
by Chicago’s WBEZ. The show, hosted by Chicago-based rock critics Greg
Kot and Jim DeRogatis, opens each week with a roundup of music news
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that frequently covers industry trends. For example, they provided ongoing
reporting on the effect of increasingly restrictive radius clauses relative to
the growth of destination festivals; these clauses limit how closely in time
and distance an act can perform before or after a big festival, affecting their
booking availability at smaller venues that operate year-round.

CONCLUSION

Although music business reference requires a shift in focus from more strictly
defined music reference, many of the tools are already familiar. For music
librarians at multidisciplinary institutions, you may already have access to
helpful resources, and knowing how to use them will make you valuable
to a broader swath of patrons across your organization. By increasing the
scope of your reference collection and developing new sleuthing skills, you
can effectively support music business research.

NOTES

1. Randy Bachman, Randy Bachman’s Vinyl Tap Stories (Toronto, ON, Canada: Pintail, 2012), 135.
2. Ibid., 132.
3. Thom Duffy and Cathy Applefeld Olson, “Music Business 101: Schools Where You Can Learn
About the Industry,” Billboard, last modified September 22, 2014, https://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/
news/legal-and-management/6259158/music-business-101-schools-where-you-can-learn-about.
4. Richard Barnet and Dicky Dixon, Directory of Music Business Degrees: Undergraduate and
Graduate College Music Industry Degree Programs (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014).
5. Middle Tennessee State University, Office of Institutional Effectiveness, Planning and Research,
2014 Fact Book, http://www.mtsu.edu/iepr/factbook/2014_MTSU_Factbook.pdf (accessed June 15, 2015)
6. Ibid.
7. Vernon Silver, “The Song Remains Pretty Similar,” Bloomberg Business Week, no. 4379 (May 19,
2014): 66–71.
8. Steven Bertoni, “The Most Important Man in Music,” Forbes 189, no. 1 (January 16, 2012): 80–89.

ORCID

Grover Baker http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0995-3273