Music Web Glossary
The Web has proven to be where music may be located, reviewed, discussed, shared, and purchased. Musicians know this and get Online to upload their music and become a part of the world wide music machine process. They come on the Web at every age, at every experience level – musically and computer savvy. From youngsters starting out to seasoned performers just learning where the computer on switch is, the workings of being on a computer may be overwhelming with everything else they have going on in their lives.
The Web furthermore allows performers access to music knowledge. performers will come across difficult terminology and phrases that they do not understand. Compiled in the following mini glossary are music business, digital, companies, record biz lingo, computer terms and standard need-to-know info. Hopefully, something listed here will endorse you navigate music On-line a bit easier, and so you know, this glossary is an excerpt of an extensive list found on Artistopia.
A&R – Artist and Repertoire, aka skill scouts: a record company liaison whose duties can include to find, choose and develop the music artist, band and/or songwriter.
Affiliate Program – a way to earn income by linking your Web site to another website, depending on the action taken by the visitor.
ASCAP – American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers which licenses and distributes royalties to it’s members’ copyrighted works.
Bandwidth – has little to do with the size of a performer but is a measure of the amount of information (data) that may be sent over a network connection in a given period of time. Bandwidth is oftentimes measured in bits per second.
Bitrate – The number of kilobits per second of data in your audio file. The bitrate you choose when creating an MP3 file determines the size and quality of the resulting MP3. The highest commonly available bitrate is 320 kbps and the higher the bitrate, the closer the encoding is to the original source of music.
Blanket License – allows the user to perform any or all, in part or all, of the tunes in the ASCAP repertory. What a warm and cozy license.
Business Manager – an performer or band manager that specializes in the financial matters, including planning, investing, income, taxes, decisions and contracts.
Buzz – to get people talking about a new artist, band, song or album, creating intense excitement and/or rumors.
Clause – a chubby fellow in a red su it is Claus: in a record contract, there can be certain limitations, specifications, or modifications that stipulate the last outcome of that contract.
Concert promoter - with duties including ticketing, PR, marketing, and booking, this agency or agent responsibilities are for concert party promotion.
Content – to make the Search Engines happy and have pages rank well in a search result, a nice quantity of well written text aligning with the web site’s keywords and theme updated usually is a Webmaster’s steak and potatoes.
Cookie – no, not chocolate chip, but a piece of software that records info about your visit to a Web site, then holds the info until the server requests it.
Copyright - a session of exclusive rights regulating the use of a specific expression of an idea or information, in our case artistic properties, the songs and sound recordings.
Derivative Work – a new work based on or resulting from one or more preceding works.
Digital Licensing – the use of copyrighted music compositions including downloads, on demand streaming, limited use downloads and compact disc burning.
Distributor – the agency or agent that handles the sales and shipment of the music (records, CD s) to the marketplace or basic ally, gets the product to the consumers.
Domain Name - a sign post on the Web, it’s a unique name that identifies an Web website.
Digital Rights Management – Digital Rights Management is a technology that protects a piece of intellectual digital property such as a music, video, or text file.
Encoding – the process of converting audio to or from a compressed format prefer MP3 or WMA.
Exclusive Rights – under copyright law, the privileges that only a copyright owner has with respect to the copyrighted work.
Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) - a file format for audio data compression that does not remove information from the audio stream, as MP3, AAC, and Vorbis do.
Grammy Awards – an award ceremony for all genres presented by the Recording Academy for outstanding achievements in the recording industry: a gold megaphone for your mantel.
Groupie – what has the point of being an act without groupies? Overly enthusiastic listeners with much love to provide.
HTML – HyperText Markup Language, programming language for the world wide web. A Web browser interprets the code written and displays it for a Web page and Website s. Some substantially standard knowledge of HTML might endorse on some web site s.
Hook – a pirate: a music phrase, a passage, an idea – something (catchy and/or repetitive) that makes the song stand out and be more appealing and recall ed.
Hype – sensational and extreme promotion of a person, idea or product.
Independent – an independent performer or band that desires to do-it-all-themselves and/or not affiliated with a larger record label.
Intern – generally a college student job at a record label in a no or low paying position, more of an apprenticeship learning the ropes and gaining business experience.
Web Service provide r (ISP) - how and who connects your PC or network to the Web, whether dialup, DSL, Cable, T1 or T3.
Master Recording License – pertains to the recording of a performance itself, which are ofttimes controlled by the record label.
Mastering – the final stage and preparation in a recording before weapons of mass duplication, includes the consistency of audio levels and quality perfecting.
Mechanical License – the use of copyrighted musical compositions for use on compact disc s, cassettes, record albums.
Music Contracts – all the various bits of paperwork used in the music business, always read the “fine print” to the many contracts – recording, management, finders fee, general release contracts. When the contracts come in – time to get an Entertainment Attorney.
music industry – all things pertaining and related to the business of music, dominated by the Big Four major labels: Sony BMG, Warner, Universal and EMI.
Music Publisher – provides services such as marketing, pitching and promoting works written by songwriters. Deals with the commercial exploitation of music catalogs and tunes.
Press Kit – aka media kit, a prepackaged set of promotional materials for a music musician or band for distribution including song samples, bio, historical info, photos and contact information.
Producer – duties include: controlling the recording session, guidance of the artist(s), coaching, organizing, scheduling of production sources and budgets, as well as supervising the process of recording, mixing and mastering.
Publishing Royalties – income paid to the writer of a song.
RIAA – Recording Industry Association of America, the organization that represents the interests of record labels and producers in the USA.
Ripping – means to take an audio compact disc and record it to a PC in an uncompressed file format (wav). Digital audio extraction from one media form to a hard disk.
Roadie – the road crew that travels with a band on tour. These hard working individuals do everything but the performance, are technicians, do the session up and take down, security, bodyguards, pyrotechnics, and lighting.
Sampling Rate – the number of samples taken per second when digitizing sound. The higher the number, the better the quality of the digital reproduction.
SoundEx vary - an independent, nonprofit show rights organization that collects and distributes digital show royalties for recording artists and record labels when their sound recordings are performed on digital cable, satellite TV music, Internet and satellite radio.
Sound Recording – the copyright of the recording itself (what you hear, the entire production) as distinguished from the copyright of the song (words and music owned by the songwriter or publisher).
Synchronization License – aka “synch” license, allows the user to reproduce a musical composition “in connection with” or “in timed relation with” a visual image, motion picture, video, advertising commercial – from the copyright owner of the music.
Talent Agent – or booking agent, the representative of the music artist(s) that performances up the live concert s.
Vanity Label – a celebrity recording performer is given a label within a label and runs under the umbrella of the parent label.