5 ms·

I'd say the music industry went to Spotify and other streaming services. Wouldn't be suprised if music download sales are now less than physical CD or vinyl sal

I'd say the music industry went to Spotify and other streaming services. Wouldn't be suprised if music download sales are now less than physical CD or vinyl sales. And music streaming services do use DRMs like Widevine too, unfortunately.

jacquesm 3y ago
> Wouldn't be suprised if music download sales are now less than physical CD or vinyl sales. The music industry did that to themselves though. They went for digital because they thought they could re-sell the same content at 400% mark-up to their previous customers, but in turn they let the genie out of the bag in terms of reproducibility without loss. That's the main reason you see all these 'remastered' releases: to be able to squeeze the lemon a bit more. If they had just stuck to vinyl and cassettes they could have milked that cow for decades to come (but not at the quality level of what they music industry puts out at the moment).
- pjc50 3y ago
  The music industry never went to digital downloads. They were entirely forced to by competition from Napster from digital CD rips.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    They went to digital when they introduced the CD. That opened the door to people ripping those CDs, if they hadn't gone digital they could have avoided that entirely.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    CD's were the first digital versions. That's what enabled the lossless reproduction that GP is talking about. I don't agree with GP though that they did it to themselves. I think they would have been quickly forced to digitize anyway had they tried to resist the CD
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Sony and Philips (the parents of the CD) were doing this while they were at the same time part of the music industry as such. They didn't resist the CD, they pretty much invented it. It's possible that otherwise another entity would have come up with a practical digital format but without the support of the music industry such a format would have surely failed, especially because initially there were no recordable optical media, which is what you need if you want to introduce a new format without having access to a very large catalogue of music.
      - freedomben 3y ago
        ah, fair point, thanks!
- arghwhat 3y ago
  They went to digital releases because they wanted access to a large customer base. Buying physical music is a chore I certainly don't have time for, nor would I be able to listen to music from an LP or cassette in any of the scenarios I normally listen to music. Plus, LP and cassette audio quality is Very Bad, and LPs wear out. Music was pirated before digital music was a thing, but it brought a way bigger market. The problem now is with how newer streaming services haven't figured out how to pay artists, or have been unwilling to do so. Although, perhaps the value of music has just changed with time.
  - Fatnino 3y ago
    I can tell you first hand that cassette audio could wear out too.
- rickdeckard 3y ago
  I'm not following. None of the crucial elements for this evolution was actually developed by the music industry If the music industry would have stuck to vinyl and cassettes, the digital era would have still happened. - At some point people would have recorded their vinyls/cassettes to WAV and store offline. - Lossy compression comes along, - People start sharing content online - Music industry is disrupted
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Digitizing a phonograph is a lot harder than ripping a CD.
    - rickdeckard 3y ago
      Which is irrelevant. In a world where the CD didn't exist, someone would have built a phonograph with Line-Out, which later would have been connected to the Line-In of a PC. Assuming that MP3 wouldn't have disrupted the music industry if they'd have sticked to Vinyl and Cassette is ridiculous. Even today, Vinyl rips of music exists. The core of this disruption was not in the process of creating the MP3, it was the ease of music distribution without any involvement of a music label.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        > Which is irrelevant. In a world where the CD didn't exist, someone would have built a phonograph with Line-Out, which later would have been connected to the Line-In of a PC. The quality of which would have been lower than that of a CD. Incidentally: many phonograph/amplifier combinations had the option (or even a built in) cassette recorder so that part was readily available from the 70's onward. > Assuming that MP3 wouldn't have disrupted the music industry if they'd have sticked to Vinyl and Cassette is ridiculous. You're welcome to your opinions as well. > Even today, Vinyl rips of music exists. Yes, they do. But they're not close to the quality that you get when you use FLAC on a CD image, or a high quality MP3 encoding (lossy, but not quite that lossy). In order to rip vinyl you will have to do your own A->D, you've already gone through a whole pile of analogue stuff, you will have picked up some hum, lost some high and lost a lot of low. CD audio put master tape quality in the hands of millions and then when MP3 happened suddenly all of that was instantly available. If the required steps had been reliant on someone doing all of that work it would have been a lot less quick in terms of adoption. Building the hardware to do this properly so that you'd get something equivalent to a HiFi set on subsequent output isn't all that easy, especially not if you care about modulation depth. > The core of this disruption was not in the process of creating the MP3, it was the ease of music distribution without any involvement of a music label. That was another required step, but the widespread availability of master tape grade digital content was an enabler as well and I really don't see why you would deny that. FWIW I'm the guy that encoded the dutch broadcast archive for TROS so that they could easily call up tracks without running to the physical archive. Trucks with CDs would arrive and harddrives would go the other way. We did many thousands of them. Without the CDs ripping at 40 speed or so that would have absolutely never happened. Ripping a vinyl record at any level of quality will take you more than an hour, there are all kinds of environmental factors, you'll wear out needles like there is no tomorrow and you're going to be busy fiddling with tone arm pressure and all kinds of finicky bits if you want to get even close to something that's good enough for broadcasters.
jcranmer 3y ago
Fortunately, the RIAA actually has an easy-to-read graph of where music industry revenue comes from: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/. In 2022, ~$500m came from music download sales, whereas ~$1700m came from physical sales. And ~$15000m came from streaming. From 2012 to 2017, music download sales were ahead of physical sales.

jacquesm 3y ago

> Wouldn't be suprised if music download sales are now less than physical CD or vinyl sales. The music industry did that to themselves though. They went for digital because they thought they could re-sell the same content at 400% mark-up to their previous customers, but in turn they let the genie out of the bag in terms of reproducibility without loss. That's the main reason you see all these 'remastered' releases: to be able to squeeze the lemon a bit more. If they had just stuck to vinyl and cassettes they could have milked that cow for decades to come (but not at the quality level of what they music industry puts out at the moment).

pjc50 3y ago
The music industry never went to digital downloads. They were entirely forced to by competition from Napster from digital CD rips.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  They went to digital when they introduced the CD. That opened the door to people ripping those CDs, if they hadn't gone digital they could have avoided that entirely.
- freedomben 3y ago
  CD's were the first digital versions. That's what enabled the lossless reproduction that GP is talking about. I don't agree with GP though that they did it to themselves. I think they would have been quickly forced to digitize anyway had they tried to resist the CD
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Sony and Philips (the parents of the CD) were doing this while they were at the same time part of the music industry as such. They didn't resist the CD, they pretty much invented it. It's possible that otherwise another entity would have come up with a practical digital format but without the support of the music industry such a format would have surely failed, especially because initially there were no recordable optical media, which is what you need if you want to introduce a new format without having access to a very large catalogue of music.
    - freedomben 3y ago
      ah, fair point, thanks!
arghwhat 3y ago
They went to digital releases because they wanted access to a large customer base. Buying physical music is a chore I certainly don't have time for, nor would I be able to listen to music from an LP or cassette in any of the scenarios I normally listen to music. Plus, LP and cassette audio quality is Very Bad, and LPs wear out. Music was pirated before digital music was a thing, but it brought a way bigger market. The problem now is with how newer streaming services haven't figured out how to pay artists, or have been unwilling to do so. Although, perhaps the value of music has just changed with time.
- Fatnino 3y ago
  I can tell you first hand that cassette audio could wear out too.
rickdeckard 3y ago
I'm not following. None of the crucial elements for this evolution was actually developed by the music industry If the music industry would have stuck to vinyl and cassettes, the digital era would have still happened. - At some point people would have recorded their vinyls/cassettes to WAV and store offline. - Lossy compression comes along, - People start sharing content online - Music industry is disrupted
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Digitizing a phonograph is a lot harder than ripping a CD.
  - rickdeckard 3y ago
    Which is irrelevant. In a world where the CD didn't exist, someone would have built a phonograph with Line-Out, which later would have been connected to the Line-In of a PC. Assuming that MP3 wouldn't have disrupted the music industry if they'd have sticked to Vinyl and Cassette is ridiculous. Even today, Vinyl rips of music exists. The core of this disruption was not in the process of creating the MP3, it was the ease of music distribution without any involvement of a music label.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      > Which is irrelevant. In a world where the CD didn't exist, someone would have built a phonograph with Line-Out, which later would have been connected to the Line-In of a PC. The quality of which would have been lower than that of a CD. Incidentally: many phonograph/amplifier combinations had the option (or even a built in) cassette recorder so that part was readily available from the 70's onward. > Assuming that MP3 wouldn't have disrupted the music industry if they'd have sticked to Vinyl and Cassette is ridiculous. You're welcome to your opinions as well. > Even today, Vinyl rips of music exists. Yes, they do. But they're not close to the quality that you get when you use FLAC on a CD image, or a high quality MP3 encoding (lossy, but not quite that lossy). In order to rip vinyl you will have to do your own A->D, you've already gone through a whole pile of analogue stuff, you will have picked up some hum, lost some high and lost a lot of low. CD audio put master tape quality in the hands of millions and then when MP3 happened suddenly all of that was instantly available. If the required steps had been reliant on someone doing all of that work it would have been a lot less quick in terms of adoption. Building the hardware to do this properly so that you'd get something equivalent to a HiFi set on subsequent output isn't all that easy, especially not if you care about modulation depth. > The core of this disruption was not in the process of creating the MP3, it was the ease of music distribution without any involvement of a music label. That was another required step, but the widespread availability of master tape grade digital content was an enabler as well and I really don't see why you would deny that. FWIW I'm the guy that encoded the dutch broadcast archive for TROS so that they could easily call up tracks without running to the physical archive. Trucks with CDs would arrive and harddrives would go the other way. We did many thousands of them. Without the CDs ripping at 40 speed or so that would have absolutely never happened. Ripping a vinyl record at any level of quality will take you more than an hour, there are all kinds of environmental factors, you'll wear out needles like there is no tomorrow and you're going to be busy fiddling with tone arm pressure and all kinds of finicky bits if you want to get even close to something that's good enough for broadcasters.

jcranmer 3y ago

Fortunately, the RIAA actually has an easy-to-read graph of where music industry revenue comes from: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/. In 2022, ~$500m came from music download sales, whereas ~$1700m came from physical sales. And ~$15000m came from streaming. From 2012 to 2017, music download sales were ahead of physical sales.