How Streaming Services Saved The Music Industry (cnn.com) 79
An anonymous reader quotes CNN:
The music industry was in crisis just a few years ago. Sales were cut in half from their peak as single downloads, YouTube and piracy made the CD album go virtually extinct. But music has found its white knight: streaming. Last year, recorded music revenues in the United States went up by 13% to $11.1 billion — the highest level since 2006... "The music industry today is healthier than it's been in more than a decade," Josh Friedlander, the senior vice president of research at the Recording Industry Association of America, told CNN Business.
"Revenues from streaming services are more than offsetting decreases in physical sales and digital downloads." Friedlander added "it's hard to overstate the impact streaming music has had on the music industry...." Music streaming — which includes paid streaming, ad-supported streaming and streaming radio — represented about 5% of the music industry's revenues in the US in 2009.
In 2019, that number had grown to roughly 80%, according to the RIAA.
"Revenues from streaming services are more than offsetting decreases in physical sales and digital downloads." Friedlander added "it's hard to overstate the impact streaming music has had on the music industry...." Music streaming — which includes paid streaming, ad-supported streaming and streaming radio — represented about 5% of the music industry's revenues in the US in 2009.
In 2019, that number had grown to roughly 80%, according to the RIAA.
young whippersnappers and their foul music (Score:2)
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Saving the oldies... personally, I'm contributing to the salvation of Bob Seger, Don Henley, Sawyer Brown, the Wallflowers(Oxford comma) and Stevie Nicks; and, still, supporting the likes of Passenger, Lindsey Sterling, and Tyler Farr.
Music's in the ear of the beholder, and no preference is wrong.
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Shouting the words and autotune are just plain wrong and sound like crap, especially when you can readily recognise it. Most in the modern industry are rubbish and just autotuning it. Time to rewrite copyright laws and wipe them out.
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Most in the modern industry are rubbish
Most in the old industry were crap too, but those are long since forgotten.
Except Don Henley (Score:3)
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Or for ancient oldies: http://www.1940sukradio.co.uk/... [1940sukradio.co.uk]
By fucking over the artists (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds a lot like the 70s, where the managers gave the artists what they wanted, which was usually drugs and the odd car or two. Just enough for the artists to be happy while they sucked off 90% of the cash for "reasons, you aren't expected to understand".
Re: By fucking over the artists (Score:5, Insightful)
The "music industry" isnt about the artists, it's about the labels.
Re:By fucking over the artists (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: By fucking over the artists (Score:1)
Re:By fucking over the artists (Score:5, Interesting)
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$0.006 a play is more than fair. With the old model, then you bought a CD, it would cost you $15, and there would be 12 tracks on there. If you listened to it 100 times, then you're down to $0.0125 cents every time you played a song. Sure, a lot of CDs you probably never listened to that much, but there were probably a few that you listened to 1000 times. I think it all balances out. For something like a streaming service, you don't get a physical product that you get to hold onto. You can't resell it aft
Re:By #ing over the artists (Score:2)
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That's how it's always been. It was the same with records, and with CDs. Only the very top-selling, super-star artists do well financially.
The relationship between artist and label isn't equal. There are millions of artists desperate for a shot at the big time and possessed of sufficient talent, so the label can offer as bad a deal as they want to. If one artist isn't desperate enough to take it, another one will.
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If RIAA had their way... (Score:1)
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No, vinyl records. CD's are digital, so you can make perfect copies. They'd also like to do away with cassette tapes, since it's cheap and easy to record onto cassette tapes. Only vinyl is both fragile and easy to break, degrades over time (it's not as solid as you think, so it will warp over time), and there is no reasonably priced option to record onto them yourself.
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Not the same thing. A wax cylinder (or, in this case, plastic cup) isn't a vinyl record.
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Vinyl isn't fragile and doesn't oxidize either so it should last an extremely long time. Unless you store records in a Texas attic they should last a century or more. Hell even the shellac 78s from the early 1900s are still playable.
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Vinyl isn't fragile ....
ummm I disagree Vinyl is extremely fragile and you would get about 50 plays of the record till you got a scratch , 100 plays if you were really careful. My Memories of Vinyl are the awful static pop sounds you would get overtime from scratches and the endless loops that would happen if a scratch lined up perfectly and knocked the needle back to the previous part of song. Here's a website recordings of what scratches on a vinyl record sounded like. https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachi... [mynoise.net]
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All of that comes from improper needle weight and tracking. Like people taping a penny to the end of the arm because the needle is so worn. The needle only needs like 2-3 grams of force max.
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They would still be forcing us to buy physical CDs.
No one's forcing me to buy CDs - I do it because it's cheaper and the artists actually get a half-decent cut. Streaming is fucking up the music industry, not saving it.
And, the RIAA hate CDs because they can be copied and transported. One payment, lifetime usage.
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I fail to see how buying CDs is cheaper than streaming. I can subscribe my entire family, up to 6 people, for about the cost of a single CD every month, and have access to thousands of albums, including every album that comes out every month. If I was spending the same amount myself, each person would have an allotment of 2 CDs per year, but with streaming, we might all listen to hundreds of new CDs every year.
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Typical headlies (Score:2)
I wonder if the labels have considered how much (Score:2)
more they could be making if places like Apple weren't taking 20-40% off transactions?
And what about the artists?
Is there an actual accounting process to pay them $.0001 a play yet? Or do I need to add more places to the right of the decimal?
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A big part of why spotify and apple music are successful is because they have music have all the diff labels. Even if the label ran their own streaming service it would have been bound to fail because they wouldnt sell their competitors stuff.
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I wonder if the labels have considered how much more they could be making if places like Apple weren't taking 20-40% off transactions?
Probably about as much as they could have made if the retailers hadn't taken a similar cut between the wholesale and retail price of physical recordings.
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I wonder if the labels have considered how much more they could be making if places like Apple weren't taking 20-40% off transactions?
Probably about as much as they could have made if the retailers hadn't taken a similar cut between the wholesale and retail price of physical recordings.
Which, by the way, was squat. Because neither the retailers nor the current streaming services would, or could, work for free. Yes, they could have built their own streaming services. But then they had to make them succes
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I wonder if the labels have considered how much more they could be making if places like Apple weren't taking 20-40% off transactions?
Probably about as much as they could have made if the retailers hadn't taken a similar cut between the wholesale and retail price of physical recordings.
Retail never had a big markup. It had the thinnest slice of the pie.
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And what about the artists?
Is there an actual accounting process to pay them $.0001 a play yet? Or do I need to add more places to the right of the decimal?
I really don't know if streaming services are to blame on that end, I mean, seeing how they want to be legal, and need to negotiate with the record labels/rights agencies, who seem like they would hold ALL the leverage (AND have a history of fucking artists out of royalties).
Consolidation of licensing (Score:2)
thats why its hard to find a smartphone (Score:3)
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It doesn't really seem to matter at this point in the US, though, as many of the remaining radio stations got bought out by iHeartMedia. They have their own fairly popular music streaming app for iOS and Android. They even had a Windows Mobile version back when that was a thing.
Most of the other large surviving stations have a streaming presence as well, so the only reason you would want that FM tuner is if you had a really limited data plan.
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Thanks to the Communication Act of 1996, which eliminated ownership restrictions, the vast majority of radio stations in the U.S. are owned by 2 big companies. With no meaningful competition, radio (which was never that great to begin with) has become completely irrelevant and unlistenable.
Turn on any radio station and the only thing you'll hear are endless commercials occasionally interrupted by a song that was a big hit 40+ years ago.
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I only have 6GB and no signal between home and work, you insensitive clod!
Re: thats why its hard to find a smartphone (Score:1)
It saved the corporations (Score:4, Insightful)
The artists are still being screwed as usual.
Maybe but I've bought 1 album in the past 10 years (Score:3)
Because almost everything I want to listen to is on YouTube! Even if I have the album i search for it and usually end up on YouTube.
I used to buy a lot of stuff - I have no desire to anymore. It's not even some old man's gripe about how they don't make good music anymore. I just see no reason to buy music anymore. It's already on YouTube and I'm not such an audiophile that I'm going to quibble with the bit rate.
Plus I already have more than enough shit to listen to on CD and cassette if the internet ever goes down. The vinyl collection is lacking a bit. I'd wear that out in a week if that's all I had to listen to.
Old people like me don't buy much music anyway. It's always been the young kids and teenyboppers. Not that there's anything wrong with being young
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I am an old guy and I do buy CDs every one and then when I find something I like.
Well, whoda thunk? (Score:3)
Piracy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there actual evidence that the drop I sales was because of piracy?
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To the extent the RIAA claimed, I don't believe a word of it. Think back to the time when Napster was th biggest thing going, there wasn't just music on the internet we were starting to see basic movie streaming, the promise of true MMOs online, the internet was a little lawless around that time but it was also full of experimentation. Tons of people were testing the internet to see what it could it do for them, many well known names we see today were getting their first taste of the internet and forming id
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Is there actual evidence that the drop I sales was because of piracy?
There have been studies done that found piracy not only didn't hurt the music industry, it actually helped it. It said pirates were also the biggest consumers of physical media, and that others would have never bought what they downloaded in any case.
Technology is the key (Score:4, Insightful)
It did seem at the time that the music industry didn't know its ass from its elbow, running around like Chicken Little waiting for the end of the music biz. The eat-all-you-like streaming services like Spotify have shown that there is still money to be made.
Back in the 60s and 70s you have millions being thrown at just a handful of artists, music labels could be very picky about who they chose and nutured and with no other way to distribute music than vinyl and cassette, they controlled the whole damned chain. Along came cheap cassettes and punk rock, it said you just need to find some mates, some cheap instruments from a junk shop and a cassette player with record button and on a small scale you could write, record and distribute your own music. The labels still obsessed with throwing money at huge stadium acts ignored this underground movement, small labels with a little bit of borrowed cash sprang up, they paid for early artists to get into small slightly better studios, they arranged to have the music distributed in small scale and you got the independent label scene up and running.
Fast forward to today now anyone with access to any kind of device can make music and with the internet can distribute to see if anyone likes it, consrequently you have a zillion people trying to make it as a musician, some are damned good. You can get your mates together in the morning, write a few basic songs over lunchtime, records something on a Mac/PC by dinner and in the evening your loading it onto a site to see who likes it! It can literally be that quick now. With such a democratic system in place the numbers will swell.
The kicker is that we can have incredible niche interests in music because there are so many more artists able to serve our very specific tastes. An old record label can't possibly have a roster of 25,000 artists but a "free to upload your music" website can serve that purpose. People will still buy classic music from the labels but if you want free-form prog jazz with a hint of rap and metal, I bet you a $100 there's someone out there doing it and their not a major label, if I like it I'll give them my money through their website or if they're luck through my Spotify subs or Apple iTunes if their indy label can afford to sign up.
The same is happening in publishing and photography. back in the 1970s my Dad would buy pro level camera kit every couple of years, a camera body would cost him 3 or 4 months wages, he'd have to save that up. Now you have people doing photoshots on their iPhones, anyone can buy a damn good DSLR camera from the local Walmart for maybe a few hundred bucks. With micro-stock sites, anyone can upload their pictures and see if they can make a couple of bucks a month for their trouble. I work a 9-5 job in a major city but I make almost $1000 month from taking photos in my spare time, selling prints, licenses and educational materials, I spent 7 years learning how to shoot photos and now I make some pocket money from my hobby.
Technology costs come down and people embrace creative technology and find ways to make money in cottage industry ways, this impacts the major players after about a decade when people really get to grips with it.
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Fast forward to today now anyone with access to any kind of device can make music and with the internet can distribute to see if anyone likes it, consrequently you have a zillion people trying to make it as a musician, some are damned good.
Not if you want it to sound good. I'm preparing to record my second album, we use devices like phones and cameras for quick rough recordings that sound ok however compared to a properly recorded and produced music with quality microphones in a acoustically pleasing environment they sound like shit and something I would never let out.
You can get your mates together in the morning, write a few basic songs over lunchtime, records something on a Mac/PC by dinner and in the evening your loading it onto a site to see who likes it! It can literally be that quick now.
Done that to, usually on a four track, it's still only a rough copy. For proper recording we use 20 tracks at 96kHz, some bands use a lot more than we do. We have had 18 mic
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The GP grossly oversimplified the point being made for the sake of expedience, but that doesn't make him wrong.
Yes, one will get better sound out of a Neumann U67 and a Focusrite over some iRig-with-a-lightning-connector from Best Buy, but the latter will still get you at least halfway there, and far closer than was possible even 20 years ago with cassette-integrated recording boards. Yes, a fully mic'd drum kit with individual recordings and kitchen-sink-edition Protools with a metric ton of plugins is ide
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We can agree on its limited artistic expression, but there is room in the market for both stuff-that-costs-basically-nothing-to-create, and the labor of love you and your band mates are working on.
Oh for sure, I don't have a problem with that, what I'm pointing out is it has limits and if everyone recorded that way there would be no room for Crank Dat, everything would sound the same. My experiences are that the complexity increases to produce a good sound especially if there is more than one musician simply because the art of production is mostly removing sound to make space for the instruments to be heard.
By wasting energy and ruining the climate (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not a lot of resources. A 10 MB file consumes a 10Gbe link for less than one millisecond, costing something like 20 mJ of energy. Okay, you have to multiply that by the number of links involved, but the total's still going to be fairly small. There's a good chance it compares favorably to manufacturing and running more local storage for everybody.
Your playback device will consume more energy playing the song than it took to transmit to you.
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Re: By wasting energy and ruining the climate (Score:1)
Damn you, streaming services! (Score:2)
We've been pirating hard, trying our best to kill the music industry, then you morons come in and save the bastards? Damn you!
Not me (Score:2)
I don't subscribe to any streaming service, though I do occassionaly buy & download music from Amazon.
By making everyone purchase their music again (Score:2)
Crisis ? What Crisis ? (Score:1)
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Music is not industry! (Score:3)
Art.
Entertainment.
Emotion.
But not industry.
Napster (Score:4, Interesting)
Bet they still whine about 'piracy' though (Score:2)
RIAA says:
WAAAH! Pirates are eating all our profits! We want them cracked down on and all arrested and deported and stuff!!!1!!
Yeah, it be like that still doesn't it? :p
Yet the content creators are still getting the short end of the stick, aren't they?
Just say no (Score:5, Insightful)
I've always disliked streaming. Here's why:
- The selection never seems to include my kind of music.
- Requires network connection to play
- My (poor) music taste can be profiled on a daily basis
- The artists often gets ripped off by streaming services.
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A) Streaming services have grown a lot in recent years, likely whatever you like is there now.
B) At least the big ones, Spotify and Amazon Prime for example, all allow you to download offline copies for use. We recently did this for a trip to Cuba.
C) Yes well, at the same time it offers up said poor taste back to you in suggestions so there is that.
D) It isn't like Artists weren't getting ripped off using all other previous distribution schemes.
I will say however it recently became clear that the streaming
Note: NOT the musician industry! (Score:2)
To which the music DISTRIBUTION industry is the leech on the neck that sucks your spirit and your wallet dry.
So yay! More crap manufactured "music" *product*, off the assembly line.
Yay, the music distribution "industry" still doesn't have to work for their (actually the artists' and fans') money, and can just call it their "property", to "justify" infinitely raking in money in return for letting you make a copy (to clog the lines) over and over again.
Which is toootally unlike literally printing money, or ra
Still true about the entertainment business... (Score:1)
Uneven payouts (Score:1)
11.1 Bn of which 11 Bn goes to Ed Sheerin and Drake.
I stream (Score:2)
See how we were saying it for years (Score:1)
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