10 ms·

Revenue is broadly in line with what it's been: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ I grew up during the age of p

• gizajob 3y ago
  Revenue is NOWHERE NEAR what it was - you’re neglecting to click on the graph that says “value (adjusted for inflation)”. The graph is a clear indication of an industry trying to transform itself by whatever means having been repeatedly decimated. If the entire US music industry was a company, it wouldn’t even make it into the S&P 500.
  • morsch 3y ago
    I clicked the button. It's literally within a few percent of where it was 30 years ago, adjusted for inflation. I call that broadly in line. Yes, it was much bigger in 2000, and much smaller in 2010, also bigger in 1978 and smaller in 1982. It was never that big, in absolute economic terms. I remember Slashdot was joking 20 years ago that one of the tech companies should just buy all of it to make the RIAA shut up. I guess it's unsurprising that organized culture has an outsized reach.
    • gizajob 3y ago
      It looks about 40% lower, not a few percent. I’m not denying that the recorded music industry has been totally overcome, and in some senses they’re lucky to have anything at all from Spotify, but almost everyone in society wants recorded music and the revenue side of it is dying, indeed, almost completely killed except for those at the very top of the pyramid. This hasn’t happened in the same way in other intellectual industries. It is how it is, but it’s a shame that something we all want has to be expensively done and then given away basically for free.
      • cdelsolar 3y ago
        I mean this is what live music is for. Concerts have always been the best way to make money.
        • sotix 3y ago
          The Beatles didn’t seem to think so.
          • AniseAbyss 3y ago
            In the history of music performing is how artists made money. The studio album age of the 60s and 70s are the exception not the rule.
          • strunz 3y ago
            Ah yes, let's use the most successful band of all time as the example not the exception
            • sotix 3y ago
              They did say always! I’m pointing out it’s not quite always.
      • smugma 3y ago
        40% lower from the peak, which led to an even larger decline with the birth of Napster. Ignoring 1994-2000, revenue is roughly inline with where it’s been the last 30 years. And music companies (labels and publishers) are seeing record profits.
  • gruez 3y ago
    >If the entire US music industry was a company, it wouldn’t even make it into the S&P 500. Market cap =/= revenue
    • gizajob 3y ago
      Ok slight miscalculation, having looked again, by revenue it would be around the size of the 250th largest company, ie the recorded music industry has the same revenues as GAP or Nordstrom. If GAP disappeared overnight, few would be impacted. If all recorded music disappeared overnight, it would be a disaster. Ok piracy then, and free music, but I think there’s a serious crisis in the production of new and innovative music, and it’s indicative that recorded music was a 20th century phenomenon.
      • smugma 3y ago
        Another miscalculation by a factor of ~2: you’re only looking US music revenues. And further: the numbers are only recorded music revenues, which excludes publishing, which accounts for another 20% error (or 40% of your base number). So now we are at Fortune 100 for this arbitrary statistic. More relevant is that music companies’ multiples are higher than ever. 9 figure ($100M+) sales for songwriter/artist catalogs aren’t common but we see several per year for older catalogs like Bob Dylan and newer ones like Bieber and Ryan Tedder (whom many have never even heard of, he’s a songwriter and lead singer of One Republic). Over the past five years, there has been lot of investment flowing into music companies.
  • dgb23 3y ago
    Even if adjusted for inflation, it seems middling rather than "nowhere near what it was" and it seems to grow as well. The 90's were an outlier IMO, because we got CD's for easy distribution but it was before the internet and especially smartphones were widely available. Companies like Spotify and Netflix basically hinge on being more convenient than internet based piracy, radio, ad supported streaming etc.
    • matwood 3y ago
      > because we got CD's for easy distribution Not just that, but it triggered a huge rebuy of old music for the format change from cassette. That's literally never going to happen again.
      • deleted 3y ago
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    • ghaff 3y ago
      The early CD era represented a pre-web period where people were not only making regular run rate music purchases but also replacing some amount of the vinyl they already owned. (And cassette as sibling post mentions.)
  • gokhan 3y ago
    Might be smaller lately because what's produced nowadays is crap. Things exciting this year came from Stones and Beatles, you figure :) We have Spotify family subscription, always listening one of us' playlist at the dinner table and almost all of it created before 2000, and most before 1990. I'm talking about one 16yo, one 11 yo and two adults. Recently, 16yo started his A levels here in London. The whole class created a playlist with their fav songs from all genres, 70+ teenagers. Hardly 10% of it is post 2000. Kids' family backgrounds are as diverse as it gets.
    • jncfhnb 3y ago
      London must be yearning for the older times
    • ivan_gammel 3y ago
      > Might be smaller lately because what's produced nowadays is crap. Things exciting this year came from Stones and Beatles, you figure It is a matter of personal taste, curiosity and influence of people around you. There’s a lot of good music and good songs that were written in this century and in the last 10 years. However, this period of time is very small compared to the time passed since great classical music works were created. No wonder its share is small.
    • klyrs 3y ago
      You're describing your bubble. In mine, young women rappers are being discovered in droves, previously on youtube and now tiktok. They don't have Death Row tier production quality, but by the time they make it to Spotify, they're putting out bangers. It's little surprise that your nuclear family listens to such a narrow range of music. Growing up, I didn't listen to new music in the house either. We had classical, old country, ragtime, and big band -- nothing newer than 30 years ago. My parents thought everything else was noise. Oh, and funny thing, I've recently discovered artists from the 90s that I never heard of back then. Music discovery is, in my experience, in a golden era. There's not only a huge amount of new music, but as old music makes it online, it's making it to my ears.
      • gizajob 3y ago
  • zaphirplane 3y ago
    it is not my duty to have jayz make another 100 million There are some really rich musicians and music industry people. What are you advocating for ? More expensive streaming subscription will mostly go music labels and top musicians who are multi millionaires some hundreds of millions Taking the money from parents of school kids and average 9-5 people
• isodev 3y ago
  I agree and I see it with my own music habits. I do listen to Apple Music stuff all the time, but really there are a handful of artists I value personally and can recognise by name. Even today, I continue to buy their vinyl records not really for the purpose of listening but just because it's a cool way to support them outside of streaming.
• klelatti 3y ago
  > Revenue is broadly in line with what it's been: More precisely revenue has just caught up to the level it was 30 years ago
• zuminator 3y ago
  I think what may be happening is that we hear loudly and often from the mega-stars who used to comfortably earn millions from each new album release or even single release and now get lower streaming revenue. But we never hear from the hundreds of thousands of "long tail" smaller performers who previously would've earned zero within a couple years after releasing their last CD, but who now get a small but steady trickle of income from streaming. I've got dozens of songs on my Spotify playlist that the world has entirely forgotten about in terms of radio or public exposure, and the performers themselves might be middle-aged realtors or office workers by now who have entirely given up their music careers, but their songs were little earworms to me back in 2003 so I still play them occasionally. Not that the people negatively impacted don't have cause for complaint. But we're only hearing one side of the story.
  • rchaud 3y ago
    They're slashing royalties to the very same long-tail artists you think you're supporting. > A new threshold of minimum annual streams that a track must meet before it starts to generate royalties. The threshold, according to MBW, will de-monetize tracks that had previously received 0.5% of Spotify’s royalty pool. https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-changing-how-pays-artists-stream-thresholds/ https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-changing-how-pays-arti...
    • zuminator 3y ago
      That's ostensibly to deter the proliferation of noise and programmatically generated junk where one "artist" might upload hundreds or thousands of tracks in the hope of getting paid due to accidental clicks and the like. Anyway if the cutbacks only represent 0.5% of the total royalty pool, then they don't impact what's typically meant by the long tail, wherein the smaller back catalog items, in aggregate, end up being a substantial fraction of the total sales.
  • avgcorrection 3y ago
    > I think what may be happening is that we hear loudly and often from the mega-stars who used to comfortably earn millions from each new album release or even single release and now get lower streaming revenue. I vaguely recall that Taylor Swift took her music off Spotify over concerns for the small artists. Like doing it on behalf of them. I have my doubts about that being the reason, though...
• carlosjobim 3y ago
  > Revenue is broadly in line with what it's been Not if you adjust for inflation. Not if you adjust for population growth. Not if you adjust for growth in artists and music avaiable. So in the end the money that goes to artists is worth maybe 10% of what it was in 1973, while serving a customer base that is 58% larger, probably much larger than that considering everybody has access now. And this money has to be split among many more artists than before, including many artists who have been dead for decades.
  • morsch 3y ago
    No, I clicked the adjust for inflation button. You do have a point re: population growth -- the per-capita spend on music is smaller than it was. But regarding artists, you're sort of making my point: there are certainly more artists around that address essentially the whole world, as opposed to just themselves or their local area. Playing an instrument hasn't gotten easier (even that is arguable), but mastering music (at a mediocre level, maybe) has gotten easier, and distributing music has gotten way easier (presumably eventually that should affect the revenue split between labels and artists). And yes, all those artists of today are in competition with the artists of the past. So there's certainly less money for each individual artist today, and there is more music available to me today, and I still don't have more time available to listen to much more of it. But you do have a point regarding population growth.
    • carlosjobim 3y ago
      > No, I clicked the adjust for inflation button. Generally we have to adjust much more for inflation, as official inflation numbers are mostly fraudulent. I agree with you on the cost of producing and distributing music going down, and I think it's fair to say that the creative part is easier and cheaper as well. But don't people have more time to listen to music today when it is accessible everywhere?
      • morsch 3y ago
        I guess that's probably true. Though the Walkman and its descendants have been popular since the 80s, and music radio was very accessible and routinely running in the background in situations where people now listen to Spotify.
• VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
  > Revenue is broadly in line with what it's been: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ > I grew up during the age of peak CD sales, and I still only bought like ten audio CDs in my life, all of them on the secondary market. This is the kind of anecdote that tries to make an example that proves the argument, but it's so wildly different from the average music consumer in the 1990s that it's completely irrelevant. You bought 10 CDs at a 2nd hand store in your entirely life and now you pay more for Spotify. But most people were buying 10, or 20, or 30, or more CDs a year, .... and now they're paying _less_ for Spotify.
  • aitechguy77171 3y ago
    > most people were buying 10, or 20, or 30, or more CDs a year So most people have a collection of 100 to 300 CDs? And if you include tapes and records, the average senior owns between 300 and 1500 albums? This seems totally delusional, I think you are in a bubble.
  • ghaff 3y ago
    I’m willing to bet that the average poor college student I knew in school was buying at least one album a month—albeit sometimes secondhand and I probably bought a lot more than that after graduation.
  • washadjeffmad 3y ago
    No one makes money when I play the Funkadelic album I've owned for the past 20 years, but my SO can't make it two or three songs without an ad on Spotify. Distribution costs are lower without, so any reduction in CD sales seem easily offset by digital sales, ads, etc.
  • morsch 3y ago
    Yeah I mean, I wish people would illustrate their anecdotes with statistics, right? Oh wait, I did. I even alluded to the fact that I was an outlier in not buying CDs in the late nineties. But then the rest of the world got the message. And now we're spending as much on renting music as we did buying it in the eighties.
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• bad_user 3y ago
  I can corroborate this experience. As a teenager in the 90s and a young man in the 00s, I barely bought a couple of original CDs in those decades. Most of the music I had was pirated (downloaded, or recorded from radio). I would fill my hard drive with 10s of GB of MP3s, then I'd cycle through it via Winamp. And I have no acquaintances with large music collections, unless that music was pirated. Currently, I'm paying for a Spotify subscription AND a YouTube Premium subscription, which is way more than zero $. Artists making money are those performing live, and filling auditoriums and stadiums with people. The kind of artists that have dedicated fans, and that make albums that become collectibles. That has always been the case.
• geden 3y ago
  No. This assumes all artists are alike, which patently they are not. Artists that make amazing music that doesn't stream well, are pretty fucked and their revenue stream from recorded music has basically vanished. Spotify algorithm filters these artists hard. I call these artists peak experience artists, they make music you might listen to occasionally, perhaps even just a handful of times, but you don't listen to in the background daily / weekly / monthly. Whereas' pre streaming to listen to it once you bought a CD for £14.99 and the label got £7 and the artist on an indie got ~£3.50. Now the artist gets <0.01p for that listen. Huge difference and a chiling effect on the sort of music that can be made. (I've worked for a big UK indie and currently manage musicians and have seen the trends in music distribution first hand since 1992). Many artists who happily make Spotify friendly music do handsomely if the algorithm is generous. But many do not and can no longer have a full time career in music. And no, live shows do not make up the shortfall. Not all artists are comfortable playing live and it's harder for artists to reach critical mass where touring is even possible / profitable. Unless they are already wealthy, which is why you see again and again the same ilk of rich kids breaking out in music (see Fred Again, Fourtet, etc etc).
  • scarface_74 3y ago
    There have always been artists who languished in obscurity. They had no chance of distribution before the internet.
  • matwood 3y ago
    How did these amazing artists that no one really listened to get their CD in the store? I think there is a lot of hindsight bias here. The internet made shelf space unlimited, and artist that used to toil away in absolute obscurity now have a shot. I don't think we're talking about those who would have had a CD on the local store shelves, we're talking about those playing at random bars in their town.
    • geden 3y ago
      They were signed by labels who also made money from the sale of those records. Those labels are now looking for different music.
• layer8 3y ago
  It would be interesting to know how the amount (hours) of music being listened to changed over time, in comparison. With streaming and radio, it correlates in time, whereas with physical media and downloads, purchases stretch over time in relation to when you listen to them, and the revenue is decoupled from how much you listen to it.