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Music industry roles and useful concepts
Music industry roles and useful concepts

Discover the key roles and concepts in the music industry.

Brian Sucari avatar
Written by Brian Sucari
Updated over a week ago

Here we share with you some roles that work in the music industry and help the artists to succeed:

- Music Producer: Is the beatmaker who helps artists record their songs, albums, or projects. His responsibilities can involve a range of creative and technical leadership tasks. A music producer has a deep knowledge of music as well as technical expertise and it's up to the minute on today's formats, genres, and sounds.

- Composer: Is a professional writer of music for multiple instruments or vocal ranges and denotes important aspects of a song, like melody, chords, and tempo. Sometimes, multiple composers work together to write a piece of music.

- Arranger: Is the one that interferes in melodies to improve the composition expressions. Arrangers help finish, rework, and adapt preexisting compositions by altering elements such as instrumentation, orchestration, harmony, tempo, and genre.

- Manager: Is responsible for representing musical artists, like musicians, bands, and singers. Also, a manager helps them to meet their goals. For example: organizing auditions, tours, concerts, performances, and more.

- A&R: Artists and repertoire refer to talent hunters that usually work in a record label which are not only in charge of scouting new musicians, they also help to develop their careers.

- Publisher: Is responsible for making sure that composers and songwriters get incomes from royalties in exchange for managing their songs and taking a portion of the payment from them.

- Legal Advisor: They negotiate legal contracts in general.

- Booking Agent: They find opportunities for artists. Their duties are to negotiate and review contracts for performances, arrange travel, and confirm appearances.

- Marketing Team: A group of people that generate and implement creative art campaigns in order to boost album or single sales.

- Art team: They are responsible for everything related to visual and graphic design to get the audience's attention. In the case of our partners, Disruptive, they are an agency that ideates and designs products and brand identities to boost future promotions. For example: they create covers, print ads, posters, and displays for stores.

- Press: Music press is about public relationships and artist information diffusion so that they generate interest among the public, media, and record companies.

To sum up, if you are trying to get in the music industry professionally, you need to create a good quality team to help you achieve your goals!

Now, let's see some handy terms to get to know the music industry a little bit more:

- Playlisting: It is when a store, streaming platform, or independent curator generates its own lists of specified tracks that have a particular genre, mood, sound, or some characteristic in common.

This is really important nowadays because playlists are a great place to discover new music and get exposure. As a music artist, you could also benefit financially from the boost in streams and downloads. Plus, users gain time discovering new sounds without having to filter through it all themselves.

If you are wondering how to stand out with playlisting there are many ways to do it: you can make your own playlists collaborating with other artists, partner with places that will reproduce your tracks regularly or contact curators and editors that can make you reach millions of listeners. This is harder than the other possibilities but is by far effective.

- DSP: Digital Service Provider is a streaming service or online store where albums and singles are featured. For example: Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Youtube Music.

DSPs adopt a royalty payment model which plays a central part determining the split-share of all registered streams generated and usually do not pay artists directly. In the case of distributors like Zil Distribution, they get the income from the masters, and in the case of publishers from compositions.

- DSP's Strategy: As we mentioned, DSPs provide opportunities for discovery and fanbase growth. This is why, before releasing new music on the stores, there should be a planification strategy in order to get to the editors. Actually, some distributors have a great network that facilitates it.

In order to have a successful strategy the artist profile should already have a meaningful audience and many content uploaded such as a profile picture, canvas, banner, bio pics.

Your visibility and music promotion efforts are the keys to editorial consideration and to have a successful strategy. To ensure you're making the most of the platform a good idea is to add a profile picture, canvas, a banner, and bio pics.

If you aren't getting editorial consideration don't waste your time trying to reach them, there are many other ways to get the audience's attention.

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