Music of New York City that its status has declined in recent years, due to a combination of increased corporate control over music media, an increase in the cost of living, and the rise of local music scenes whose success is facilitated by the cheap communication provided by the Internet. New York has been a center for the American music industry since the earliest records in the early 20th century. Since then, a number of companies and organizations have set up headquarters in New York, from the Tin Pan Alley publishers and Broadway to modern independent rock and hip hop labels, non-profit organizations, and others.
Transparency of media ownership in Europe outputs and contents while transparency empowers readers to detect and appraise owners influences on the media and its contents. The European Commission's study on Indicators for Media Pluralism (2009) recognises transparency of media ownership and/or control as a key indicators of media pluralism. Also, media ownership transparency is essential for preventing concentration of media power which can unduly influence public opinion and the political debate. Precisely, transparency of media ownership is a precondition for assessing levels of concentration or other dimensions of diversity in a given media system. Indeed, if readers don't know who the real owners of media companies