The locution "music industry" still too often refers to a single subset of profit-making practices in music: record labels and the activities around them. Media scholars are partly to blame, as they continue to define record labels, and especially labels that are part of conglomerates, in this way. Yet this notion of the production and sale of recordings as the basis of "the music industry" is hardly a part that represents the whole. Drawing on the work of Christopher Small and others who have decentered the musical text as the basis of music criticism, I argue that media industries scholars must do the same, opening up our inquiries to a wide range of music industries; that is, industries whose activities directly affect the performance, production, circulation, consumption, recirculation, appropriation, and enjoyment of music today. Opening the term up in this way will allow us to develop more robust and coherent social accounts of music as a media practice, and provide a stronger empirical basis for criticizing current institutional arrangements and proposing new, more just and convivial alternatives.