The Transformation of the Music Industry Supply Chain Essay

The Transformation of the Music Industry Supply Chain - Essay Example This research will begin with the statement that developments such as Information Technology (IT) have had profound impacts on the way companies do business. Of late, companies have had to rethink the way their activities are coordinated from production to the final consumers. These shifts in company’s actions have not been initiated by technology alone. The theory of investment, changes in consumer preferences, taste and fashion have had a profound impact in shaping company’s strategy. Supply chain management (SCM) has been considered as the most popular operations strategy to help companies sail through these challenges and for improving organisational competitiveness in the twenty-first century. In the 1990s, agile manufacturing (AM) gained momentum and received due attention from both researchers and practitioners as SCM gradually attract interest. Both AM and SCM appear to differ in philosophical emphasis, but each complements the other in objectives for improving organisational competitiveness.Supply Chain Management (SCM) activities are related to problem-solving, information sharing, and cost reduction initiatives. The influences of individual-level antecedents on post-adoption utilisation of a specialised IT within an SCM context were examined by Bradley. Bradley found out that 92% of the people he questioned in1999, were planning to implement one or more supply chain initiatives. Supply chain plans to integrate key business activities through improved relationships at all levels of the supply chains. In short, SCM has become a necessity for any firm seeking to solidify its position in the marketplace. An effective supply chain includes a variety of firms, ranging from those that process raw materials to those engaged in wholesaling and retailing. It also includes organisations engaged in transportation, warehousing, information processing, and materials handling. 1.2 Supply-Chain and the Music Industry Supply chain is a competitive management technique employed within the last two decades to ensure the effective flow of resources, information, services within and organisation network. Today, organisations have adopted it as a strategic competitive weapon as they continue to seek competitive advantage. This quest by organisation explained the recent influx of research into SCM. Hines, P. & Rich, N. (2005) postulated that SCM has become a converging ground for various disciplines and integrate key business activities through improved relationships at all levels of the supply chains (Internal operations, upstream supplier, networks and downstream distribution channels. In figure 1.0 below, I try to look at key players in the music industry and some of their labels. This table has been adapted from http://www.soc.duke.edu . 1.2.1 Warner Music Group Being the largest in the industry, it has total assets of over $16.7 billion. The company started in the 20s following an attempt to control music. It owns the Warner music group with publisher, Warner/Chappel Music Publishing. It merger with EMI Ltd. in 2000 took it to the dominant market position. 1.2.2 Sony Music With the main publisher Sony music publishing and Columbia records, to complement its hardware operations, the management of Sony created a software manufacturing and distribution system. Sony music is a key player in the music indusrty 1.2.3 PolyGram N.V. The company has a Dutch origin and is 75% own by Phillips. The position of the company today resulted from a

Western and Chinese landscape painting Research Paper

Western and Chinese landscape painting - Research Paper Example The essay "Western and Chinese landscape painting" compares Western landscape painting with Chinese landscape painting. Most of these landscapes do exist up to now because they were and are still being used as archeological sites. Although landscape painting is believed to have been practiced all over the world, it is the Western and Chinese landscape paintings that are more predominant in archeological sites and art galleries that focus on landscape painting. Western and Chinese cultures depict a wide range of landscape painting. In most paintings, the background always contains a physical feature. In China, this is always accompanied with a waterfall or a mountain while in the West it is accompanied by rivers and lakes . To discus more about Western and Chinese landscape paintings, we will use landscape painting (1), Poet on a Mountain c. 1500 by Shen Zhou, to represent Chinese culture, as well as landscape painting (2), Poppies Blooming by Claude Monet to represent the Western cul ture. In Chinese culture, landscape painting was inspired by philosophy, represented by pure landscape and devoid of human life. Most of the landscapes were based on imaginary sceneries, such as mountain, but there was a common problem in bridging the gap between the foreground and background, or objects in far range. To solve this problem, most Chinese painters used a dead ground or the use of mist. However, in Chinese culture, there was a slight difference between the East and West Asia in the landscape paints.; in West Asia there was the classification of art according to its prestige and cultural value. This practice was known as hierarchy of genres while in East Asia the form of mountain-water ink was the most common and valued form of landscape art. East Asia dealt with imaginary landscape while the West painters dealt with history painting. With time, they required landscape painting and a poem inscribed on the painting with the use of figures to make landscape look more reli gious. A good example is one of the Chinese masterpieces by Shen Zhou which combined the painting and the poem as a religious saying: â€Å"White clouds encircle the mountain waist like a sash. Stone steps mount high into the void where the narrow path leads far. Alone, leaning on my rustic staff I gaze idly into the distance. My longing for the notes of a flute is answered in the murmurings of the gorge5." In Western culture, landscape painting philosophies were based on religious practices and carried significant spiritual weight. Also in the Western culture, artists tried to make the landscape art as real as possible6. In Chinese culture, their landscape painting aesthetics involved a lot of white or blank space, which allowed the observer to fill the void with his or her own imagination enabling different viewers to have different view of the painting, as this will depend on what or how they decided to fill the void. In addition, the Chinese landscape painting allowed the viewe r to focus on a particular image, as most of the paintings were usually blank, as in filled with mist or fog, to scrap the unwanted information, and with focused imagination allowed the observer to express his or her fillings to the image easily. In Western culture, landscape painting aesthetics included all the details that a naked eye could see when looking at a scene and this was to help the viewer to feel as if he or she was present t