Despite selling record numbers of individual songs on online services such as Apple's iTunes, the labels are in an era of declining revenues and consolidation
At the dawn of the digital music era, record labels went along with a pricing scheme devised by Apple that they are still paying for today. The idea to "unbundle" albums into separate tracks sold for 99 cents each suddenly allowed consumers to bypass higher profit-margin albums.
Q: So what should record labels do to fix things?
This article was provided with permission from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.