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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

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.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    I can go to my basement, lay down a track on a free daw that comes with my audio interface with an arbitrary number of tracks if I so please, then take that material and distribute it around the world on the internet. This is like an unprecedented golden age for the amateur musician. You can now record and distribute on your own and make some money off of it too. Music was never this easy to make, record, and distribute as it is today.
    - gizajob 3y ago
      How much money have you made doing this recently?
      - kjkjadksj 3y ago
        In theory through services like bandcamp infinitely more money than if I was passing around CDs or tapes.
        gizajob 3y ago
        What about in reality through services like Bandcamp?
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
    [deleted]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- 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

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.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  I can go to my basement, lay down a track on a free daw that comes with my audio interface with an arbitrary number of tracks if I so please, then take that material and distribute it around the world on the internet. This is like an unprecedented golden age for the amateur musician. You can now record and distribute on your own and make some money off of it too. Music was never this easy to make, record, and distribute as it is today.
  - gizajob 3y ago
    How much money have you made doing this recently?
    - kjkjadksj 3y ago
      In theory through services like bandcamp infinitely more money than if I was passing around CDs or tapes.
      - gizajob 3y ago
        What about in reality through services like Bandcamp?

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
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
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