Institutions - the World Music Market

The world music market consists of record companies and labels and publishers that send out recorded music products around the world and they control the rights to those music products.

The "big four" record groups that currently dominate the market are:
Sony BMG
EMI
Universal
Warner

They each consist of many smaller record companies
Record labels sign, market, publicize, develop and promote as well as provide sales support to the larger distribution companies for their releases and artists.
In 2005, Nielsen SoundScan reported that the "big four" record companies accounted for 81.87% of the U.S. music market.