The record industry has been around for just over 100 years and it’s an industry that mostly has been growing and growing ever since its inception. New technology has always pushed the industry forwards and helped it grow bigger and bigger with almost each year. But when the internet came in the early 2000’s it changed everything. It caused a stir in the industry when the music consumers now had the possibility to rip CD's, download music files illegally and share them with the world for free. In desperate actions to try to save the record labels from going bankrupt they did all in their power to fight the change. What eventually happened was that other actors came in and saved the business with services that embraced the change from a physical way of consuming music, to a new digital one.

This is a study of how that change has been perceived and affected the record labels and their ways of working. By using Paul Hirschs modell charting the organization of the pop music industry and the four processes that Tschmuck describes as the core activities of a record label, we’ve interviewed six record labels in the Stockholm area in an attempt to describe the new core activities and organization of the industry now that the digitization has changed the way the customers consume music.

Our findings show that the value added chain that Hirsch modelled has changed drastically, with several actors losing importance in it, while others actors has traded places. The core activities that Tschmuck described remains the same, but the ways they are executed has become more effective thanks to the new technology.