Research Project

The Business of Making Music - Analysing the Industry

Now we have some data, let's try to do some analysis of the industry. To do this we want to break down the figures into smaller parts to try to understand what is happening. You will need to use the statistics you have been looking at to do the following:

• What are the main trends in music sales, i.e. what has been happening to CD sales - have they been generally rising or falling or are they fairly stable? If they are rising or falling, how quickly have they been changing?
• What changes have occurred to the consumer profile of the music industry? Again, you will need to identify trends - are more women buying CDs than men? Is there a change in the age where most CDs are bought?
• What type of music is the most popular and what age group does it seem to appeal to?
• What changes are occurring in the amount of each different type of genre of music that is being bought?

Once we have identified some of these factors we will have built up a good picture of the industry and what is happening to it.

Now we are going to look at how these changes are affecting the way the industry operates. We are going to use one particular genre to try to piece together this information. That genre is jazz.

Jazz means different things to different people. It might initially conjure up the image of Louis Balfour - the character from the TV series 'The Fast Show' - nice, smoky rooms with 'cats' huddled over their instruments playing sounds that seem to have no connection to each other!

Image: The stereotype of jazz - but what might be explaining an increase in the popularity of this type of music? Copyright: Pierre-Alain Goualch

Jazz encompasses a wide variety of different types of music - rap artists, rock musicians and DJs amongst others will all recognise the contribution that jazz has played in influencing the direction and nature of popular music.

As a form of music that people choose to listen to it forms a relatively small part of total sales - in the US for example, the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) suggest that jazz accounts for around 2.7% of total sales but in the UK it has been reported that it is only around 1%.

Some Data on Jazz

The audience for jazz at live events in England, Wales and Scotland extrapolated from the 1999/2000 Target Group Index (TGI) figures below is 2.8 million adults, of which 1.26 million are ABC1 social groupings.

Market Share by Area

Source: Office for National Statistics and Target Group Index (1999-2000) summary of results. Arts Council of England. Kindly supplied by Chris Hodgkins of Jazz Services.

The Jazz Attender's Profile

Source: Peter Walsh, Millward Brown International (1993). Research Digest for the Arts, Arts Council of Great Britain. p.16. Kindly supplied by Chris Hodgkins of Jazz Services.

A Jazz Club Audience

Jazz Services carried out market research on the audience at a small town centre jazz club, and produced the following results:

• A 3:2 ratio of males to females
• 70% of the audience will be aged between 16 and 35
• 30% of the audience will be full time students
• 50% of the audience is ABC1 social groupings

Source: Kindly supplied by Chris Hodgkins of Jazz Services.

For those trying to make it in the music industry in this genre therefore, what are the opportunities open to them and how does the industry work for them?

The first thing we need to do is to dismiss the traditional view about how the industry works. The days when you got together with a few of your mates and form a band and within a couple of months get noticed by a record executive who offers you a lucrative contract are long gone. Like many other businesses, music has gone professional in many ways and to survive in the industry you need more than just talent.

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