Overview: 6 x 1 hr documentary series (or 3 x 90 min)

For 300 years, the music business has been an uneasy partnership of commerce and art. On one side, profit driven corporations, on the other, musicians, songwriters and artists. And on both sides, a fair share of mavericks, visionaries and misfits. Between them, they’ve built an industry that now grosses 65 billion dollars a year and in doing so they’ve broken down social barriers and given us the soundtrack to our lives.

The industry’s basic conundrum was always the same - how to get people to listen to a new song they don’t know. Whether the public would like a new song or not was always luck. To create a system that allows a multi-billion-dollar industry to function on a groundwork of luck is like building a skyscraper on quicksand. How it was done is a story of how the desire to make money (and then make more money), led to copyright battles, royalty scams, crippling contracts, creative accounting, bribery, piracy, payola and gangsterism.

The story starts with the creation of copyright in 18th century Britain. It takes us from sheet music, music hall, vaudeville and the start of records - to jazz, Broadway, the beginning of radio and the dominance of Hollywood. Post war, we move from television and rock ‘n’ roll to disco, Napster, rap and Spotify.

It was always the technology that led the music; the songs were created to fit. But whatever the preferred technology, the industry’s major problem never changed – how to get new songs into the public’s ear.

In 1930, music sociologist Dr Isaac Goldberg wrote, ‘Everything we ever sing or whistle is the end result of a huge plot involving thousands of dollars, and thousands of organised agents, the efforts of organised pluggery.’

Nearly a century later, nothing has changed!