The Italian Music Industry

Abstract

The Music Industry is a complex system in which many different actors interact. In this system there are suppliers of musical instruments, music schools, authors, singers, the phonographic industry, live events organizations and also the suppliers of those electronic devices necessary to listen to the music. This paper tries to analyze the size of those segments, their changes, and which are the key nodes in this system. Also the way we listen to music has changed a lot in this last 10 years, and the digitalization of information has affected this industry first than other media industries. Those other industries are all now carefully looking at the evolution of the business models of the music industry in which the role of all intermediaries is deeply changing. What happened at the Italian industry is not particularly different from what happened in other countries even if, for what concerns the digital music, the Italian market is not as developed as in other countries. At the end, some suggestions of industrial policy are proposed.