Watch on YouTubeEvery industry has one book that turns up on every reading list, sits on every desk, and gets replaced every few years when the law moves. For the British music business, this is it.
Music: The Business is now in its ninth edition, and it is the text on essentially every music business course in the country. That is not a marketing claim — it is a description of where the book actually sits.
What the book actually covers
Harrison is a music lawyer, and the book is structured the way a practitioner thinks: by agreement type. Recording contracts. Publishing deals. Management agreements. Producer arrangements. Live and touring. Merchandising and sponsorship. Collective licensing and the societies. For each, she sets out what the deal is for, what the standard terms look like, where the negotiating pressure sits, and what goes wrong.
The case studies are the part that distinguishes it. Rather than describing contract law in the abstract, she works through actual disputes and what they established — which is far more instructive, because it shows you which clauses have been fought over and why.
The ninth edition's substantial addition is artificial intelligence: what it is already doing to the industry, and the copyright questions it raises for creators. That is a moving target and any book addressing it will date, but it is currently the most pressing question in music rights and she has not ducked it.
It runs to around 450 pages and is written for use rather than for reading through. The register is legal but not impenetrable — non-lawyers report having to work at it in places, which is the honest trade-off for a book that is actually precise about contract terms.
Why you should read it
Read it if you do anything commercial in UK music. This is the reference, and the alternative to owning it is guessing at what standard terms look like — which is an expensive way to negotiate.
Read it if you work across jurisdictions. The obvious American comparison is Donald Passman's All You Need to Know About the Music Business, and the two are frequently described as counterparts. They are not interchangeable. UK and US practice diverge on points that matter commercially, and if your only reference is Passman you will make confident assumptions that are wrong on this side of the Atlantic.
And read it alongside Chris Cooke's Dissecting The Digital Dollar, also covered here. Harrison gives you the contracts; Cooke gives you how the money moves through them once signed. Together they cover the two halves of the same question, and either alone leaves a gap.
Key takeaways
- Structure the book by agreement type, and you structure your thinking the same way. Each deal has its own standard shape, its own pressure points, and its own failure modes.
- The case studies are the value. Knowing which clauses have generated litigation tells you where to spend your negotiating capital.
- UK practice is not US practice. Assuming otherwise is one of the more common and more costly errors in cross-border music work.
- AI is now a contract question, not just a technology one. The ninth edition treats it as a live copyright problem for creators rather than a futurist aside.
Meet the author
Ann Harrison is a media and music lawyer with a long career advising artists, producers, managers and publishers on copyright, contracts and the protection of rights. She was formerly head of the music group at a leading media and entertainment law firm and now runs her own legal consultancy.
Beyond practice, she teaches. She has been a guest lecturer on the Masters in Music Business and Law at the London College of Music at the University of West London, and was formerly a visiting professor at the University of Hertfordshire.
Music: The Business has been through nine editions, published by Virgin and now Ebury under the Penguin group. The book's longevity is the point: an industry reference is only useful if someone keeps rewriting it as the law and the market shift, and she has done that for decades.
Get your copy
Music: The Business
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