Is The Audience For Popular Music Created By The Music Industry?

The music industry has a huge influence over what music the produced and heard by the public, therefore the audience for popular music is at the very least affected by the music industry. This is due to the fact that record companies want to maximize sales, therefore follow music trends, and discourage creativity as this may harm their profits. In doing this it can be argued that the popular music audience itself is essentially being created by the music industry. With the major record labels such as EMI, Universal and Warner holding a monopoly in the market some suggest that due to the music trends ‘recordings generally sound the same, with some variation’ Ibid , meaning that more experimental music is harder to come by as small labels have a lot less money to produce with meaning that they cannot afford records to fail unlike the big labels who claim ‘for every hit song..there are 10 recordings that make no significant commercial impact’