A Music Business Primer explores the ecology of the music industry. The symbiotic partnership between music businesses and the creativity and talent of musicians and performers is clearly described, for without the contributions of both, there is no music industry.

A Music Business Primer contains chapters on how the business works, synopses of controversial industry lawsuits and incisive interviews with influential entrepreneurs such as Peter Gotcher, cofounder of Digidesign; Will Ackerman, cofounder of Windham Hill Records; and Wendy Day, founder of Rap Coalition.

The music industry is in a state of flux. Artists, nonprofit associations and industry businesspeople are challenging many of the provisions in major label recording contracts and those marketing and sales practices that choke consumer access to recordings and competition from independent labels. Free file sharing challenges all music businesses to find methods to satisfy the demands of the public for music without destroying the basic principle of copyright law: artists should be paid for their creative works. All of these issues and more are explored in A Music Business Primer.

Diane Sward Rapaport is a music business pioneer. She began offering courses for musicians in music business management and publishing in 1974, after working for seven years as an artist's manager for Bill Graham's Fillmore Management. Her goal was to help musicians and songwriters make a living from their art.

In 1976, she cofounded, edited and published Music Works-A Manual for Musicians, a magazine hailed as a "bible for musicians" by the San Francisco Chronicle. It was the first magazine to feature music business and technology news.

In 1979 How to Make and Sell Your Own Record, her first book, was published by Putnam and now by Prentice-Hall. It has been called the "bible and basic text" that has helped revolutionize the recording industry by providing information about setting up new recording labels independent of major label conglomerates. It has sold more than 200,000 copies.

"This book has played a pioneering role in the long-overdue broadening of the avenues of the music industry.. It has worked to reshape the way music is marketed, while helping to introduce ostensibly "uncommercial," innovative and truly special artists and their music to receptive audiences. More importantly, it has helped many of them realize their dreams." ? Loreena McKennitt, from the foreword to How to Make and Sell Your Own Recording.

In 1988, Diane Rapaport founded Jerome Headlands Press, a company that produces and designs books for musicians and artists. Its current catalog Includes How to Make and Sell Your Own Recording; The Musician's Business and Legal Guide; The Visual Artist's Business and Legal Guide and The Acoustic Musician's Guide to Sound Reinforcement and Live Recording. The books are published by Prentice Hall.

She has given numerous music business seminars for colleges, nonprofit music businesses and music conferences and served as an adjunct professor of music business at the University of Colorado, Denver.