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Global music market grew by 18.5% in 2021, driven by paid subscription streaming

jjulius 5y ago
So the artists themselves saw some of this growth, too... right?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ProfessorLayton 5y ago
I am having a hell of a time adjusting to a streaming-focused music world. On one hand, I love having access to pretty much all the music I want, and have discovered a lot of new artists (through no help of the apps themselves, however). On the other hand, having my library randomly switch on me with songs disappearing, album covers swapping out or renamed is driving me NUTS. Not to mention the general buggyness that's on iOS Music. I feel like maybe it's just me because people generally enjoy it, but the app is a pretty terrible experience overall (Slow, buggy, messy). It sometimes refuses to play a song! Maybe I'm just getting old. I'm on a family plan where the cost per person is negligible, so I can deal with it most of the time, but I do sometimes miss the ipod days.
- navbaker 5y ago
  I'm still irrationally hanging on to those days. I usually buy mp3 albums on Amazon and download them, then transfer to my iPhone. Occasionally I run across an album that just will not copy over, it just silently fails in iTunes when I try to drag and drop. I think the latest is Dave Brubeck's Time Out, I have to play that via the Amazon Music app.
  - rapsey 5y ago
    What is supper weird to me is how billie eilish songs very often don't start playing. I can click on anything in my library and it is fine. Trying to play billie and the app just sits there waiting.
- bredren 5y ago
  Simple music discovery has not recovered from just perusing the top daily or weekly on oink.
- BaseballPhysics 5y ago
  So stop streaming and start buying. That's still an option. I use streaming services for taste testing, but if I really like something and want to own it, I turn to a DRM-free platform (e.g. Bandcamp) to buy from the artists, then use my own solution for playing that music on my devices (in my case Navidrome). And as a bonus you'll put a lot more money in the pockets of the artists you love.
  - ProfessorLayton 5y ago
    I've purchased plenty of music, but the problem is that at least on iOS, the music app will still swap out song/album/info/art, or mismatch them altogether. The app itself is optimized for streaming, with everything else being an afterthought. My favorite way to support artists I love is to go to their tours and buy their merch, including vinyls that are too cumbersome to actually listen to :D.
    - BaseballPhysics 5y ago
      > I've purchased plenty of music, but the problem is that at least on iOS, the music app will still swap out song/album/info/art, or mismatch them altogether. I wonder if another app might solve your issues? Certainly my combo of Navidrome + substreamer (on Android) doesn't have any of those issues. My music is tagged and has embedded artwork and the app just uses what's there. Then I just use MusicBrainz Picard to ensure my tags are clean and in good shape. > My favorite way to support artists I love is to go to their tours and buy their merch, including vinyls that are too cumbersome to actually listen to :D. This is the way!
    - jamiek88 5y ago
      iTunes Match still exists. I use that with Apple Music. It’s still only $25 per year. All my obscure old hip hop cds nicely looked after by Apple and available to stream or download anywhere.
    - jiveturkey 5y ago
      That's a common bug. I fixed it and it has stayed fixed. I am pretty sure I followed the recipe here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252329979 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252329979
- 8bitbuddhist 5y ago
  This is why I host my own personal streaming service. I'll buy music, copy the files to my server, and use Airsonic to stream it to my laptop, phone, etc. It's a lot more work, but I'd rather have full control than use something like YouTube Music, where I can only hope that the songs I like don't get pulled or the service itself doesn't get shut down.
- digitalnomad91 5y ago
  You can use youtube-dl-gui to grab mp3's from many different platforms. I also grab mp3's using ymusic and a hacked pandora app on my phone. I miss the days of what, waffle, and oink though. Still haven't gotten into orpheus yet. Also op above is right, bandcamp is awesome.
- Adraghast 5y ago
  I encourage you to check out an app called Marvis. It’s a frontend for Apple Music (iOS only) that eliminates a lot of the default client’s issues. Until recently, I was paying for Tidal despite having Apple Music as part of my Apple One subscription, but switched back once I discovered Marvis.
- gentleman11 5y ago
  Where can you buy (drm free) music these days? After google play shut down, I haven’t known where to go
  - mr_mitm 5y ago
    Amazon has MP3 downloads, at least where I live. Last time I bought a CD there, the corresponding MP3 download was included.
  - djkoolaide 5y ago
    Bandcamp. A lot of artists just sell their stuff directly on their Bandcamp page now, and you get the choice of format when you download (MP3/WAV/FLAC/etc).
  - warp 5y ago
    iTunes still has a store where most music is DRM free, and available in a lot of countries (as opposed to Amazon MP3, which is only available in a few). If you have a Mac it's fairly easy to right-click a purchased, downloaded song in Music.app and click "open in finder", so you can copy it (or the entire album) to some self-hosted music server/app. There are sites like bandcamp, boomkat, beatport, bleep, 7digital, but they all have smaller collections, so may not have what you're looking for. There's also budget options of questionable legality hosted in countries with a more flexible approach to music licensing, like e.g. mp3va.com.
  - iamdbtoo 5y ago
    Qobuz sells drm-free standard and hi-res flac files.
  - lmm 5y ago
    Aren't all music stores DRM free these days? I personally use Amazon, but iTunes or... hmm, you're right, a lot of the big name digital music stores have now shut down.
  - voltaireodactyl 5y ago
    Bandcamp is the pinnacle of such places in my opinion. I’m hoping it stays as it is for many years to come.
- _fat_santa 5y ago
  > On the other hand, having my library randomly switch on me with songs disappearing, album covers swapping out or renamed is driving me NUTS. Where are you seeing this happen? The only thing I ever notice is album covers swapping out. In the 6 years I've been a spotify customer, I can only ever recall 2-3 songs becoming unavailable.
candiddevmike 5y ago
Doesn't say how much the actual artists are seeing of this growth, and how spread out it is. These streaming services make it really hard for smaller artists to stand out, almost everyone uses the services "radio" equivalent which seems to play a very narrow scope of similar artists (mostly more well known). Basically it seems like it's easier than ever to become a musician with global reach/fans but harder than ever to make a decent living off of it.
- BaseballPhysics 5y ago
  Yup. Listen to any smaller artist and they'll tell you streaming services are only good for exposure and the real money is in ticket sales, swag, and physical and digital sales to buying customers.
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    I feel like this was true before streaming as well. smaller artists would say 'the label takes so much of the record sales, touring/swag is where I make money'
    - BaseballPhysics 5y ago
      I don't disagree, but streaming services have dramatically exacerbated the problem. Any artist that's been around before and after streaming will tell you that they make far less money, now, than they did when they were selling records, even after their labels and publishers and distributors took a cut.
      - zuminator 5y ago
        > Any artist that's been around before and after streaming will tell you that they make far less money, now, than they did when they were selling records, I read this all the time, and I don't dispute it's true. But I also don't understand the math. Spotify claims to have paid out $7 billion to artists this year. Let's assume that only a quarter of that went to North America, which is the approximate proportion of the North American Spotify market vis a vis the world.[0] So that's $1.75 billion. In the year 2000, which was the top year for CDs, 985 million CDs were moved.[1] Artists would get paid like $1.50 per CD. [2] That was $1.48 billion. Accounting for inflation that comes to $2.43 billion.[3] OK, $2.43 billion > $1.75 billion, so bang, artists made more in the before times. Except, Spotify is just one service. Amazon, iTunes, Tidal, YouTube, Deezer, Pandora, etc. are also paying artists. I don't have the numbers for all those services, but collectively they comprise 2/3 of the streaming market. Assuming their payouts are comparable to Spotify's, the total annual North American streaming payout isn't $1.75 billion but $5.25 billion. And $5.25 billion is a lot more than $2.43 billion. All of these numbers are very back-of-the-envelope, but even so, I'm not seeing why the artists are getting a bad deal in comparison to the way it was before. Certainly the argument can be made that objectively they were getting an extremely crappy deal before, and now it's graduated to "merely" crappy. But just on the numbers, I'm confused how it can amount to far less money, especially as the payouts keep growing. I have a couple of hypotheses as to why it might seem worse. (TLDR is that the artists who benefit from the Spotify arrangement aren't talking, but the ones suffering are.) First of all, popular musicians over time tend to peak at some point and then make less money, simply because their time in the sun has passed. The overwhelming majority of artists with lucrative careers in 2000 don't have lucrative careers now. They got less popular but also coincidentally streaming happened. Might as well blame streaming. Meanwhile, the artists popular in 2022 were in grade school or younger in 2000 are making vastly more money now than they were then, simply because they weren't in the industry yet. Mega-stars like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo weren't even born. They're silent about those days because they didn't experience them. But a fair accounting has to take the Spotify winners into account, not just the people who are suffering now. Second, I think that a lot of streaming dollars are going toward that long tail, in rather negligible amounts individually but amounting to a good sum collectively. Assume the top tier musicians in the streaming era are losing out compared to their potential income in a physical media dominated regime. But, meanwhile there are tens of thousands of older artists who have weird, obscure tracks that nobody would physically buy on a whim -- and probably wouldn't even be in stock in a physical store -- but their tracks end up getting played occasionally on streaming for a variety of reasons: They were excerpted in a film, TV show, article, or other song, which causes people to look them up, their title or lyrics cause them to pop up on keyword searches, they end up on a shared playlist, etc. Here's a concrete example. I like the Dua Lipa song "Love Again," the one that that has the chorus with the Darth Vader theme done in old-timey style. Except, it turns out it's not the Imperial March at all. It's a sample from an actual old-timey 1932 song, "My Woman." [4] When I found this out, I added this 90 year old song to my playlist, and probably played it a dozen times. That meant the current rights holders got paid about $3.50 on my account. But there's no way I would've paid for a CD, so they would've made zero off me without streaming. Multiply that same story by many others. How many? In my case, Last.fm says I listened to about 6300 new tracks in 2021. In the physical media era I would've had to buy a CD every single day to equal that. In my peak purchasing heyday, probably around 2000, I only bought approximately one CD a week, a lot more than average, but even so that only comes to about 1000 tracks a year. So thanks to streaming services, I helped 5300 more tracks generate revenue that otherwise would not have done. Or to put it another way, Last.fm says I listened to about 3000 different artists (~1500 artists for the first time) who all got paid some small amount, whereas in the time of CDs all that money would've been spent on the few (40-50) artists who I liked well enough to buy a whole CD/CD-single. The losers are the popular newer artists who were deprived of my CD royalties, but of the winners, many are dead or no longer in the industry, so their positive perspectives aren't being heard. [0] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/spotify-statistics/#Spotifyusersbyregion https://www.businessofapps.com/data/spotify-statistics/#Spot... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/186772/album-shipments-in-the-us-music-industry-since-1999/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/186772/album-shipments-i... [2] https://www.indiemusicacademy.com/blog/music-royalties-explained#royalties-from-physical-cds https://www.indiemusicacademy.com/blog/music-royalties-expla... [3] https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2000?amount=148 https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2000?amount=148 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Again_(Dua_Lipa_song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Again_(Dua_Lipa_song)
birdyrooster 5y ago
Art is best when it's unpaid. I don't want you paying me for my music and I won't pay for yours. I am tired of corporate rent seeking in the art space. Yes this is historical for art of all kinds, but I think that was to the detriment of art rather than its benefit. The talent of artists has been used to ingratiate and inflate the perception of some truly awful people and ideas.
- BaseballPhysics 5y ago
  Based. Okay, fine, I suppose I should actually respond. The problem with this view is that truly high quality art requires time and attention that few can afford without some level of compensation. If we lived in a non-capitalist society where people didn't have to work to survive, I might agree with you. Heck, even a basic income could make a life as an artist possible. But that world doesn't exist. So your idea would do one thing and one thing only: it would relegate the creation of art to the domain of the wealthy. And that is not a world I'd want to live in.
- bitwize 5y ago
  How do you expect artists to keep doing what they do and put food on the table?
  - ProAm 5y ago
    Like every artist throughout history has?
    - bitwize 5y ago
      Patronage? I'm sure you can see how that doesn't scale.
    - fullshark 5y ago
      By getting paid for it?
      - aeyes 5y ago
bryans 5y ago
The self-congratulatory nature of the article and quotes actually betray a self-reassurance, because in reality, record labels are rapidly becoming irrelevant. They're scrambling to figure out how they fit into the TikTok era, where artists no longer require years of financial incubation to succeed. The music industry is growing because independent musicians are finally figuring out how to navigate it without any need for those traditional industry services. They deserve the credit for (most of) this, because they are working their asses off (including bringing new streaming users to the fold) and getting no recognition whatsoever from industry reporting. Sometime in the next year or two, we will see the first truly independent music superstars achieve household-name status. Once that veil is broken, then the jig is up and labels are going to be panicking -- if they're not already.
- basisword 5y ago
  Do you have any evidence of this? People have been saying labels are irrelevant for a decade or two at least now. It's never true. To succeed you need to get noticed and for that you need a marketing budget and the labels provide that. Artists can get much further than before but going viral on TikTok is not a viable career strategy for most artists.
  - bryans 5y ago
    Yes, I have tons of evidence for this, and for why all of your claims have no foundation. Allow me to provide one example of the hundreds that I personally know of or worked with (which is a tiny fraction of the numbers finding success independently). In late 2020, a band called Sub-Radio had a couple thousand followers on each social media platform and around ~15k monthly listeners on Spotify, and this was after many years of working extremely hard and even touring the US. Among many things, my primary advice to them was to start live streaming, particularly on Reddit. By the time 2021 arrived, they had more than tripled their social media presence and doubled their listener count. The continued to stream on Reddit throughout the year before recently switching to TikTok, and in the process garnered over 1 million new followers, 150k monthly listeners, sold out an entire US tour and their music is being licensed left and right. That's just one example of countless many, and it's the way the entire industry is moving. If you're not on board with that, then you're behind the times, because you don't need a million dollar music video budget to become famous and you never did. Financial support has always been a very well-understood con by the record labels, as it allows them to assume ownership over music rights under the guise of "necessary promotional activities."
gen220 5y ago
Looking for pointers on a music industry question. For an up and coming musician (e.g. Billie Eilish in December 2015, after it was clear she had potential and after she had signed with an A&R in January 2016, but well before she signed with Interscope Records in August 2016), What is the primary motivation to sign to a record label? Assuming they have a solid understanding of the financial and copyright aspects of the transaction (which I'm sure Eilish had through her brother/producer, who had worked in the industry for years), what are the primary factors that influence the decision? The ones that occur to me are marketing/PR/general exposure, access to artistic collaborators (visual, musical, etc.), and in the case of "advances" on future albums, an insurance/put option against the unpredictability of their future career. But I have never worked in the industry, so I'm seeking wisdom from the HN crowd!
- 52-6F-62 5y ago
  Labels often have established logistics for merchandizing (including design, QC, fulfillment, etc etc), websites, digital distribution through the higher-end channels, physical distribution deals (that one is even more work to get set up), connections to producers, mixing engineers, mastering houses, studios and so on. There are a lot of resources in the industry that are not available to the public. You have to build those connections over years, in some cases decades. When promoters are doing things like trying to pay you in stolen blue jeans (love you, T.O.) it can help to have more people in your corner. The music industry is segmented, and man some parts are the Wild West. Total fun, but you will struggle to make enough for cab fare at times without support.
  - gen220 5y ago
    Good insight! Let me zoom all the way out on the abstraction scale of what you said, and let me know if it makes sense. There are some segments of the music industry that are specialized, and capital-intensive or labor-intensive (merchandising, physical distribution, producing/mixing/mastering, studio access). The specialized segments would presumably not be able to exist or sustainably operate without a steady/predictable source of cash flow. The big labels are market makers, connecting talent to these specialized services, and taking a cut off the top of every D2C transaction, in the form of a special variety of IP-licensing. This results in a bimodal distribution of musician outcomes. If you're accepted by a big label, you fit into modality B, which is shifted far to the right. If you're indie, you fit into modality A, which is shifted fart to the left. If you stick it out in A, you keep a higher percentage of lower expected earnings. If you shift into B, you keep a lower percentage of higher expected earnings, and gain difficult-to-price assets in the shapes of fame, connections, and responsibilities. If this abstraction holds, it's kind of analogous to the differences between an indie hacker and a VC-funded startup founder? cool food for thought.
vikingerik 5y ago
Keep this in mind: For every headline like this about economic numbers from 2021, remember that the apparent "gain" is over the artificially suppressed baseline of 2020.
cloutchaser 5y ago
I wonder how many of these X market grew by X% last year will take account of inflation? My hunch is not many, because it sounds better without it, and these numbers need to sounds good. But looking at year to year dollar growth at 8-10% inflation is not accurate. This headline is probably only an 8-10% grow rate in real terms.
drpgq 5y ago
"The USA & Canada region grew by 22.0% in 2021, outpacing the global growth rate. The USA market alone grew by 22.6% and Canadian recorded music revenues grew by 12.6%." I wonder why the big difference.
- 52-6F-62 5y ago
  My guess is that performances have just started opening up again in Canada. That's usually a big part of revenues. From what I've seen by watching recording performances, there have been many places throughout the US to perform live in that time. Varied state-by-state even.
wwweston 5y ago
> driven by paid subscription streaming If you look at the RIAA's revenue figures over time: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ The story they sure seem to tell is that revenues in the music markets over the last 40-50 years are driven as much (or more) by favorable macroeconomic trends than any particular format. Hence the huge rise in CD sales in the irrational exuberance of the 90s. Was there anything about CDs in particular? Maybe the quality got people to pay more and boost revenues, but that probably wouldn't have happened w/o increased disposable income. CDs prominent heights in that chart are as much a function of when they were introduced (during boom time) as much as anything else. They didn't "drive" revenues themselves. Streaming is probably pretty similar. There's some particular features: streaming increases convenience when it comes to management/access and dramatically slashes the consumer cost (and artist revenue). But I'm not going to bet it's driving revenue over macroeconomic trends. In fact, I'd be willing to bet it has actually hobbled revenue at some level, since it cannibalized digital retail that was growing pretty handily even during the last recession and piracy options. Guess we'll need a recession like 2007 to find out. Streaming might be stickier than other formats since cost is capped, but I wouldn't rule out that paid subscriptions suffer.
browningstreet 5y ago
I pay for Youtube Premium (Music) and Apple Music. I don't really want to, but I listen to a variety of music, but a lot of sleep sounds & ambient music, and I keep that on Youtube. I listen to everything else on Apple Music, otherwise all my recommendations become Ambient heavy. My "ambient" moods and my "anything else" moods don't really overlap.
jiveturkey 5y ago
Maybe I am just too dense to find it, but it's too bad the summary article, as well as the actual report, don't talk at all about where that revenue was recognized: service providers, labels, artists, ...
rawoke083600 5y ago
So much easier, than piracy and buying cd's !
dataduck 5y ago
Does anyone know if this separates out listening figures for different content on popular streaming platforms? This growth lines up suspiciously with Joe Rogan moving to Spotify.
molach 5y ago
Japan has been excluded from Asia again "Asia grew by 16.1%, with its largest market, Japan, seeing growth of 9.3%. Excluding Japan the region experienced a 24.6% climb in revenues. "

So the artists themselves saw some of this growth, too... right?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

I am having a hell of a time adjusting to a streaming-focused music world. On one hand, I love having access to pretty much all the music I want, and have discovered a lot of new artists (through no help of the apps themselves, however). On the other hand, having my library randomly switch on me with songs disappearing, album covers swapping out or renamed is driving me NUTS. Not to mention the general buggyness that's on iOS Music. I feel like maybe it's just me because people generally enjoy it, but the app is a pretty terrible experience overall (Slow, buggy, messy). It sometimes refuses to play a song! Maybe I'm just getting old. I'm on a family plan where the cost per person is negligible, so I can deal with it most of the time, but I do sometimes miss the ipod days.

navbaker 5y ago
I'm still irrationally hanging on to those days. I usually buy mp3 albums on Amazon and download them, then transfer to my iPhone. Occasionally I run across an album that just will not copy over, it just silently fails in iTunes when I try to drag and drop. I think the latest is Dave Brubeck's Time Out, I have to play that via the Amazon Music app.
- rapsey 5y ago
  What is supper weird to me is how billie eilish songs very often don't start playing. I can click on anything in my library and it is fine. Trying to play billie and the app just sits there waiting.
bredren 5y ago
Simple music discovery has not recovered from just perusing the top daily or weekly on oink.
BaseballPhysics 5y ago
So stop streaming and start buying. That's still an option. I use streaming services for taste testing, but if I really like something and want to own it, I turn to a DRM-free platform (e.g. Bandcamp) to buy from the artists, then use my own solution for playing that music on my devices (in my case Navidrome). And as a bonus you'll put a lot more money in the pockets of the artists you love.
- ProfessorLayton 5y ago
  I've purchased plenty of music, but the problem is that at least on iOS, the music app will still swap out song/album/info/art, or mismatch them altogether. The app itself is optimized for streaming, with everything else being an afterthought. My favorite way to support artists I love is to go to their tours and buy their merch, including vinyls that are too cumbersome to actually listen to :D.
  - BaseballPhysics 5y ago
    > I've purchased plenty of music, but the problem is that at least on iOS, the music app will still swap out song/album/info/art, or mismatch them altogether. I wonder if another app might solve your issues? Certainly my combo of Navidrome + substreamer (on Android) doesn't have any of those issues. My music is tagged and has embedded artwork and the app just uses what's there. Then I just use MusicBrainz Picard to ensure my tags are clean and in good shape. > My favorite way to support artists I love is to go to their tours and buy their merch, including vinyls that are too cumbersome to actually listen to :D. This is the way!
  - jamiek88 5y ago
    iTunes Match still exists. I use that with Apple Music. It’s still only $25 per year. All my obscure old hip hop cds nicely looked after by Apple and available to stream or download anywhere.
  - jiveturkey 5y ago
    That's a common bug. I fixed it and it has stayed fixed. I am pretty sure I followed the recipe here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252329979 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252329979
8bitbuddhist 5y ago
This is why I host my own personal streaming service. I'll buy music, copy the files to my server, and use Airsonic to stream it to my laptop, phone, etc. It's a lot more work, but I'd rather have full control than use something like YouTube Music, where I can only hope that the songs I like don't get pulled or the service itself doesn't get shut down.
digitalnomad91 5y ago
You can use youtube-dl-gui to grab mp3's from many different platforms. I also grab mp3's using ymusic and a hacked pandora app on my phone. I miss the days of what, waffle, and oink though. Still haven't gotten into orpheus yet. Also op above is right, bandcamp is awesome.
Adraghast 5y ago
I encourage you to check out an app called Marvis. It’s a frontend for Apple Music (iOS only) that eliminates a lot of the default client’s issues. Until recently, I was paying for Tidal despite having Apple Music as part of my Apple One subscription, but switched back once I discovered Marvis.
gentleman11 5y ago
Where can you buy (drm free) music these days? After google play shut down, I haven’t known where to go
- mr_mitm 5y ago
  Amazon has MP3 downloads, at least where I live. Last time I bought a CD there, the corresponding MP3 download was included.
- djkoolaide 5y ago
  Bandcamp. A lot of artists just sell their stuff directly on their Bandcamp page now, and you get the choice of format when you download (MP3/WAV/FLAC/etc).
- warp 5y ago
  iTunes still has a store where most music is DRM free, and available in a lot of countries (as opposed to Amazon MP3, which is only available in a few). If you have a Mac it's fairly easy to right-click a purchased, downloaded song in Music.app and click "open in finder", so you can copy it (or the entire album) to some self-hosted music server/app. There are sites like bandcamp, boomkat, beatport, bleep, 7digital, but they all have smaller collections, so may not have what you're looking for. There's also budget options of questionable legality hosted in countries with a more flexible approach to music licensing, like e.g. mp3va.com.
- iamdbtoo 5y ago
  Qobuz sells drm-free standard and hi-res flac files.
- lmm 5y ago
  Aren't all music stores DRM free these days? I personally use Amazon, but iTunes or... hmm, you're right, a lot of the big name digital music stores have now shut down.
- voltaireodactyl 5y ago
  Bandcamp is the pinnacle of such places in my opinion. I’m hoping it stays as it is for many years to come.
_fat_santa 5y ago
> On the other hand, having my library randomly switch on me with songs disappearing, album covers swapping out or renamed is driving me NUTS. Where are you seeing this happen? The only thing I ever notice is album covers swapping out. In the 6 years I've been a spotify customer, I can only ever recall 2-3 songs becoming unavailable.

candiddevmike 5y ago

Doesn't say how much the actual artists are seeing of this growth, and how spread out it is. These streaming services make it really hard for smaller artists to stand out, almost everyone uses the services "radio" equivalent which seems to play a very narrow scope of similar artists (mostly more well known). Basically it seems like it's easier than ever to become a musician with global reach/fans but harder than ever to make a decent living off of it.

BaseballPhysics 5y ago
Yup. Listen to any smaller artist and they'll tell you streaming services are only good for exposure and the real money is in ticket sales, swag, and physical and digital sales to buying customers.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  I feel like this was true before streaming as well. smaller artists would say 'the label takes so much of the record sales, touring/swag is where I make money'
  - BaseballPhysics 5y ago
    I don't disagree, but streaming services have dramatically exacerbated the problem. Any artist that's been around before and after streaming will tell you that they make far less money, now, than they did when they were selling records, even after their labels and publishers and distributors took a cut.
    - zuminator 5y ago
      > Any artist that's been around before and after streaming will tell you that they make far less money, now, than they did when they were selling records, I read this all the time, and I don't dispute it's true. But I also don't understand the math. Spotify claims to have paid out $7 billion to artists this year. Let's assume that only a quarter of that went to North America, which is the approximate proportion of the North American Spotify market vis a vis the world.[0] So that's $1.75 billion. In the year 2000, which was the top year for CDs, 985 million CDs were moved.[1] Artists would get paid like $1.50 per CD. [2] That was $1.48 billion. Accounting for inflation that comes to $2.43 billion.[3] OK, $2.43 billion > $1.75 billion, so bang, artists made more in the before times. Except, Spotify is just one service. Amazon, iTunes, Tidal, YouTube, Deezer, Pandora, etc. are also paying artists. I don't have the numbers for all those services, but collectively they comprise 2/3 of the streaming market. Assuming their payouts are comparable to Spotify's, the total annual North American streaming payout isn't $1.75 billion but $5.25 billion. And $5.25 billion is a lot more than $2.43 billion. All of these numbers are very back-of-the-envelope, but even so, I'm not seeing why the artists are getting a bad deal in comparison to the way it was before. Certainly the argument can be made that objectively they were getting an extremely crappy deal before, and now it's graduated to "merely" crappy. But just on the numbers, I'm confused how it can amount to far less money, especially as the payouts keep growing. I have a couple of hypotheses as to why it might seem worse. (TLDR is that the artists who benefit from the Spotify arrangement aren't talking, but the ones suffering are.) First of all, popular musicians over time tend to peak at some point and then make less money, simply because their time in the sun has passed. The overwhelming majority of artists with lucrative careers in 2000 don't have lucrative careers now. They got less popular but also coincidentally streaming happened. Might as well blame streaming. Meanwhile, the artists popular in 2022 were in grade school or younger in 2000 are making vastly more money now than they were then, simply because they weren't in the industry yet. Mega-stars like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo weren't even born. They're silent about those days because they didn't experience them. But a fair accounting has to take the Spotify winners into account, not just the people who are suffering now. Second, I think that a lot of streaming dollars are going toward that long tail, in rather negligible amounts individually but amounting to a good sum collectively. Assume the top tier musicians in the streaming era are losing out compared to their potential income in a physical media dominated regime. But, meanwhile there are tens of thousands of older artists who have weird, obscure tracks that nobody would physically buy on a whim -- and probably wouldn't even be in stock in a physical store -- but their tracks end up getting played occasionally on streaming for a variety of reasons: They were excerpted in a film, TV show, article, or other song, which causes people to look them up, their title or lyrics cause them to pop up on keyword searches, they end up on a shared playlist, etc. Here's a concrete example. I like the Dua Lipa song "Love Again," the one that that has the chorus with the Darth Vader theme done in old-timey style. Except, it turns out it's not the Imperial March at all. It's a sample from an actual old-timey 1932 song, "My Woman." [4] When I found this out, I added this 90 year old song to my playlist, and probably played it a dozen times. That meant the current rights holders got paid about $3.50 on my account. But there's no way I would've paid for a CD, so they would've made zero off me without streaming. Multiply that same story by many others. How many? In my case, Last.fm says I listened to about 6300 new tracks in 2021. In the physical media era I would've had to buy a CD every single day to equal that. In my peak purchasing heyday, probably around 2000, I only bought approximately one CD a week, a lot more than average, but even so that only comes to about 1000 tracks a year. So thanks to streaming services, I helped 5300 more tracks generate revenue that otherwise would not have done. Or to put it another way, Last.fm says I listened to about 3000 different artists (~1500 artists for the first time) who all got paid some small amount, whereas in the time of CDs all that money would've been spent on the few (40-50) artists who I liked well enough to buy a whole CD/CD-single. The losers are the popular newer artists who were deprived of my CD royalties, but of the winners, many are dead or no longer in the industry, so their positive perspectives aren't being heard. [0] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/spotify-statistics/#Spotifyusersbyregion https://www.businessofapps.com/data/spotify-statistics/#Spot... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/186772/album-shipments-in-the-us-music-industry-since-1999/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/186772/album-shipments-i... [2] https://www.indiemusicacademy.com/blog/music-royalties-explained#royalties-from-physical-cds https://www.indiemusicacademy.com/blog/music-royalties-expla... [3] https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2000?amount=148 https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2000?amount=148 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Again_(Dua_Lipa_song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Again_(Dua_Lipa_song)

birdyrooster 5y ago

Art is best when it's unpaid. I don't want you paying me for my music and I won't pay for yours. I am tired of corporate rent seeking in the art space. Yes this is historical for art of all kinds, but I think that was to the detriment of art rather than its benefit. The talent of artists has been used to ingratiate and inflate the perception of some truly awful people and ideas.

BaseballPhysics 5y ago
Based. Okay, fine, I suppose I should actually respond. The problem with this view is that truly high quality art requires time and attention that few can afford without some level of compensation. If we lived in a non-capitalist society where people didn't have to work to survive, I might agree with you. Heck, even a basic income could make a life as an artist possible. But that world doesn't exist. So your idea would do one thing and one thing only: it would relegate the creation of art to the domain of the wealthy. And that is not a world I'd want to live in.
bitwize 5y ago
How do you expect artists to keep doing what they do and put food on the table?
- ProAm 5y ago
  Like every artist throughout history has?
  - bitwize 5y ago
    Patronage? I'm sure you can see how that doesn't scale.
  - fullshark 5y ago
    By getting paid for it?
    - aeyes 5y ago

bryans 5y ago

The self-congratulatory nature of the article and quotes actually betray a self-reassurance, because in reality, record labels are rapidly becoming irrelevant. They're scrambling to figure out how they fit into the TikTok era, where artists no longer require years of financial incubation to succeed. The music industry is growing because independent musicians are finally figuring out how to navigate it without any need for those traditional industry services. They deserve the credit for (most of) this, because they are working their asses off (including bringing new streaming users to the fold) and getting no recognition whatsoever from industry reporting. Sometime in the next year or two, we will see the first truly independent music superstars achieve household-name status. Once that veil is broken, then the jig is up and labels are going to be panicking -- if they're not already.

basisword 5y ago
Do you have any evidence of this? People have been saying labels are irrelevant for a decade or two at least now. It's never true. To succeed you need to get noticed and for that you need a marketing budget and the labels provide that. Artists can get much further than before but going viral on TikTok is not a viable career strategy for most artists.
- bryans 5y ago
  Yes, I have tons of evidence for this, and for why all of your claims have no foundation. Allow me to provide one example of the hundreds that I personally know of or worked with (which is a tiny fraction of the numbers finding success independently). In late 2020, a band called Sub-Radio had a couple thousand followers on each social media platform and around ~15k monthly listeners on Spotify, and this was after many years of working extremely hard and even touring the US. Among many things, my primary advice to them was to start live streaming, particularly on Reddit. By the time 2021 arrived, they had more than tripled their social media presence and doubled their listener count. The continued to stream on Reddit throughout the year before recently switching to TikTok, and in the process garnered over 1 million new followers, 150k monthly listeners, sold out an entire US tour and their music is being licensed left and right. That's just one example of countless many, and it's the way the entire industry is moving. If you're not on board with that, then you're behind the times, because you don't need a million dollar music video budget to become famous and you never did. Financial support has always been a very well-understood con by the record labels, as it allows them to assume ownership over music rights under the guise of "necessary promotional activities."

gen220 5y ago

Looking for pointers on a music industry question. For an up and coming musician (e.g. Billie Eilish in December 2015, after it was clear she had potential and after she had signed with an A&R in January 2016, but well before she signed with Interscope Records in August 2016), What is the primary motivation to sign to a record label? Assuming they have a solid understanding of the financial and copyright aspects of the transaction (which I'm sure Eilish had through her brother/producer, who had worked in the industry for years), what are the primary factors that influence the decision? The ones that occur to me are marketing/PR/general exposure, access to artistic collaborators (visual, musical, etc.), and in the case of "advances" on future albums, an insurance/put option against the unpredictability of their future career. But I have never worked in the industry, so I'm seeking wisdom from the HN crowd!

52-6F-62 5y ago
Labels often have established logistics for merchandizing (including design, QC, fulfillment, etc etc), websites, digital distribution through the higher-end channels, physical distribution deals (that one is even more work to get set up), connections to producers, mixing engineers, mastering houses, studios and so on. There are a lot of resources in the industry that are not available to the public. You have to build those connections over years, in some cases decades. When promoters are doing things like trying to pay you in stolen blue jeans (love you, T.O.) it can help to have more people in your corner. The music industry is segmented, and man some parts are the Wild West. Total fun, but you will struggle to make enough for cab fare at times without support.
- gen220 5y ago
  Good insight! Let me zoom all the way out on the abstraction scale of what you said, and let me know if it makes sense. There are some segments of the music industry that are specialized, and capital-intensive or labor-intensive (merchandising, physical distribution, producing/mixing/mastering, studio access). The specialized segments would presumably not be able to exist or sustainably operate without a steady/predictable source of cash flow. The big labels are market makers, connecting talent to these specialized services, and taking a cut off the top of every D2C transaction, in the form of a special variety of IP-licensing. This results in a bimodal distribution of musician outcomes. If you're accepted by a big label, you fit into modality B, which is shifted far to the right. If you're indie, you fit into modality A, which is shifted fart to the left. If you stick it out in A, you keep a higher percentage of lower expected earnings. If you shift into B, you keep a lower percentage of higher expected earnings, and gain difficult-to-price assets in the shapes of fame, connections, and responsibilities. If this abstraction holds, it's kind of analogous to the differences between an indie hacker and a VC-funded startup founder? cool food for thought.

vikingerik 5y ago

Keep this in mind: For every headline like this about economic numbers from 2021, remember that the apparent "gain" is over the artificially suppressed baseline of 2020.

cloutchaser 5y ago

I wonder how many of these X market grew by X% last year will take account of inflation? My hunch is not many, because it sounds better without it, and these numbers need to sounds good. But looking at year to year dollar growth at 8-10% inflation is not accurate. This headline is probably only an 8-10% grow rate in real terms.

drpgq 5y ago

"The USA & Canada region grew by 22.0% in 2021, outpacing the global growth rate. The USA market alone grew by 22.6% and Canadian recorded music revenues grew by 12.6%." I wonder why the big difference.

52-6F-62 5y ago
My guess is that performances have just started opening up again in Canada. That's usually a big part of revenues. From what I've seen by watching recording performances, there have been many places throughout the US to perform live in that time. Varied state-by-state even.

wwweston 5y ago

> driven by paid subscription streaming If you look at the RIAA's revenue figures over time: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ The story they sure seem to tell is that revenues in the music markets over the last 40-50 years are driven as much (or more) by favorable macroeconomic trends than any particular format. Hence the huge rise in CD sales in the irrational exuberance of the 90s. Was there anything about CDs in particular? Maybe the quality got people to pay more and boost revenues, but that probably wouldn't have happened w/o increased disposable income. CDs prominent heights in that chart are as much a function of when they were introduced (during boom time) as much as anything else. They didn't "drive" revenues themselves. Streaming is probably pretty similar. There's some particular features: streaming increases convenience when it comes to management/access and dramatically slashes the consumer cost (and artist revenue). But I'm not going to bet it's driving revenue over macroeconomic trends. In fact, I'd be willing to bet it has actually hobbled revenue at some level, since it cannibalized digital retail that was growing pretty handily even during the last recession and piracy options. Guess we'll need a recession like 2007 to find out. Streaming might be stickier than other formats since cost is capped, but I wouldn't rule out that paid subscriptions suffer.

browningstreet 5y ago

I pay for Youtube Premium (Music) and Apple Music. I don't really want to, but I listen to a variety of music, but a lot of sleep sounds & ambient music, and I keep that on Youtube. I listen to everything else on Apple Music, otherwise all my recommendations become Ambient heavy. My "ambient" moods and my "anything else" moods don't really overlap.

jiveturkey 5y ago

Maybe I am just too dense to find it, but it's too bad the summary article, as well as the actual report, don't talk at all about where that revenue was recognized: service providers, labels, artists, ...

rawoke083600 5y ago

So much easier, than piracy and buying cd's !

dataduck 5y ago

Does anyone know if this separates out listening figures for different content on popular streaming platforms? This growth lines up suspiciously with Joe Rogan moving to Spotify.

molach 5y ago

Japan has been excluded from Asia again "Asia grew by 16.1%, with its largest market, Japan, seeing growth of 9.3%. Excluding Japan the region experienced a 24.6% climb in revenues. "