How the Music Industry Survived the Internet. Sort of. (nytimes.com) 152
"Music was one of the first industries that felt the sonic boom of the internet, starting with song-sharing websites like Napster in the late 1990s and iTunes digital downloads later," writes the New York Times.
They take a quick look at how the music industry "survived an online revolution," arguing that streaming services "saved the music industry from the jaws of the internet," making it financially healthy and giving it a wider reach.
"But all is not entirely well." Even now, the music industry in the United States generates less revenue than at the peak of the CD. There's a raging debate about how long the gravy train from streaming will last. And many musicians and others say that they're not sharing in the spoils from the digital transformation....
First, I'll lay out the case that the music industry is doing awesome. More than 500 million people around the world pay for digital music, mostly in fees for services such as Spotify, Apple Music or Tencent Music, which is based in China. Those services have given the industry something it has never had before: a steady stream of cash every month. The industry also is making money a gazillion ways. When you watch a music video on YouTube, money flows to the people responsible for that song. TikTok pays record companies when videos feature their popular songs....
Revenue for the music industry has been increasing consistently since 2015, but revenue from all sources — including streaming subscriptions, CDs and royalties from elevator music — is still less than it was in 1999. Total industry revenue back then was about $24 billion adjusted for inflation, and revenue in 2021 was $15 billion, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. (Global sales data from a different music trade group show a similar trajectory.) There aren't an infinite number of people who are willing to pay the going rate in many countries of $10 a month to access a whole bunch of songs on their phones via a service like Spotify. That's what worries people who believe the music industry's digital success has peaked.
Finally, the article points out that even the most-popular songs...aren't as popular as songs got in the past. And then it links to a story headlined "Streaming Saved Music. Artists Hate It."
"The big winners are the streaming services and the large record companies. The losers are the 99 percent of artists who aren't at Beyoncé's level of fame. And they're angry about not sharing in the music industry's success."
They take a quick look at how the music industry "survived an online revolution," arguing that streaming services "saved the music industry from the jaws of the internet," making it financially healthy and giving it a wider reach.
"But all is not entirely well." Even now, the music industry in the United States generates less revenue than at the peak of the CD. There's a raging debate about how long the gravy train from streaming will last. And many musicians and others say that they're not sharing in the spoils from the digital transformation....
First, I'll lay out the case that the music industry is doing awesome. More than 500 million people around the world pay for digital music, mostly in fees for services such as Spotify, Apple Music or Tencent Music, which is based in China. Those services have given the industry something it has never had before: a steady stream of cash every month. The industry also is making money a gazillion ways. When you watch a music video on YouTube, money flows to the people responsible for that song. TikTok pays record companies when videos feature their popular songs....
Revenue for the music industry has been increasing consistently since 2015, but revenue from all sources — including streaming subscriptions, CDs and royalties from elevator music — is still less than it was in 1999. Total industry revenue back then was about $24 billion adjusted for inflation, and revenue in 2021 was $15 billion, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. (Global sales data from a different music trade group show a similar trajectory.) There aren't an infinite number of people who are willing to pay the going rate in many countries of $10 a month to access a whole bunch of songs on their phones via a service like Spotify. That's what worries people who believe the music industry's digital success has peaked.
Finally, the article points out that even the most-popular songs...aren't as popular as songs got in the past. And then it links to a story headlined "Streaming Saved Music. Artists Hate It."
"The big winners are the streaming services and the large record companies. The losers are the 99 percent of artists who aren't at Beyoncé's level of fame. And they're angry about not sharing in the music industry's success."
Maybe they made more in the 20th century because.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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What bands? Mostly what I see promoted by the music industry is marshmallow single "artists" who get their background music synthesized by a bank of machines and slather dumb-ass lyrics over the top.
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This.
The 'modern music is crap' meme is getting pretty boring (and I say that as someone who mostly listens to old music - because I'm old). I never listened to chart music in the 80s - I had to find the music I liked myself. And it was a lot harder back then. Now people have access to more musicians than ever before, with more and easier ways to find them. So as the parent suggests - if you're only finding music you hate, the problem is one of your own making.
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It's not so much that ALL new music is bad, it's that too much of it is uninspired. That's no accident, the recording industry executives are specifically selecting acts that sound the most like the last act and against acts that sound somehow "different". Whatever minor variances may sneak through get processed out with autotune and faked harmonies. Some of it is so overblown it's like listening to a Cylon singing.
The music industry can survive cassette tapes Napster and the internet. The real question is
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That was their point. You have to look deeper to find artists who create a whole album as a proper worthy work. They were talking about what is "promoted by the music industry." Nothing they said was false.
It's been this way for a long time, but it seems to have gotten worse. Or more obviously bad now that you can more easily find what's not being promoted.
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What is promoted by the Music Industry is what will sell. What doesn't sell is what is new and unique.
The stuff that is popular is the same as the stuff that was popular 20 years ago or 40 years ago or 60 years ago... You get a new singer, change the words, and instrumentation, and sometimes put a small musical rule break to give it some kick. Then you have a new pop song.
Now the stuff you loved when you were ages 13-23 where you had time to listen to the music, over and over again, and because your peers
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I didn't really like the popular stuff then, so I listened to very little music. I didn't really know how to look for better stuff. The quality stuff is what is not promoted by the industry. Now I am able to find and discover a lot more, including from back the years when I didn't think there was much to care about listening to.
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Western music was mostly formalized in the 17th century.
The pop music in 2022, follows the same musical structure that is in Bach.
A big reason why Music is popular is based on familiarity of the music. The new modernist, avant-garde stuff rarely will make it, because it is too different, so we don't like it.
The popular music, is familiar enough, often with just a little bit something to spice it up, but not too much.
A lot of people gravitate to the Lyrics, so they they had been making them very simple to
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...because music was overpriced and paying $20 for a CD with one or two good songs was dumb. Now those bands are only being paid for their one good song and not all of their bad ones also.
I don't know anyone who ever bought an album for two songs, so your argument is a fail.
Re:Maybe they made more in the 20th century becaus (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because you don't know anyone, doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. That sort of thing was almost the norm in the 70's, 80's and 1990's. It's why mix tapes were so popular.
Re: Maybe they made more in the 20th century becau (Score:2)
What the hell are you talking about? Singles stopped being common when 45s were relegated to jukeboxes.
I was born in 70 and I've owned several thousand albums across 4 major physical formats.
Mixed tapes absolutely were downselects from albums.
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But a certain type of "single" was common enough at least well into the late 90s.
There you could buy a (often small forma factor) CD with less than a handful of "tracks" on it for a couple of 'bucks'. The majority of the tracks different edits of the same song and perhaps a bonus track.
I remember the last Single that I bought. It was The Offspring - Pretty Fly in
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Most music stopped being sold as Singles and started being sold as Albums until Itunes made mp3 massive.
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Singles survived well into the cassette era, so through the mid 90s at least. CD singles did seem to be less common though. However used record stores were always flooded with flavor-of-the month CDs for $2-$3, so they were effectively singles at that point.
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Re: Maybe they made more in the 20th century becau (Score:5, Insightful)
I speak for every 80s kid here: you clearly have no idea what youâ(TM)re talking about.
Of course we bought entire CDs for one or two songs we liked. Thatâ(TM)s all that was available. Nobody bought singles â" and not every song was available as a single.
Mixtapes were our playlists. Also â" not every song we wanted was accessible. We got them off the radio or from our friends.
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I speak for every 80s kid here: you clearly have no idea what youâ(TM)re talking about.
Of course we bought entire CDs for one or two songs we liked. Thatâ(TM)s all that was available. Nobody bought singles â" and not every song was available as a single.
Mixtapes were our playlists. Also â" not every song we wanted was accessible. We got them off the radio or from our friends.
OK. It seems that the US had much less of a singles culture than the UK, from what people are saying here.
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OK. It seems that the US had much less of a singles culture than the UK, from what people are saying here.
Absolutely. The music industry has always been a form a legal racketeering. The demand for singles was really, really high when I was a teen in the 80's. However, the supply was low to non-existent (depending on location), as the music industry made WAY more money on album sales than on singles. The more popular a song was, the less likely it was available as a single. People would buy entire albums (yes, Vinyl) or entire CD's to get the most popular songs (or song), and the music industry banked on it to g
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At least on CD, a single would have 2-3 songs and would be $5.99 in the US and the full release album would be $14.99. Even if you only had a 50/50 chance of finding more songs that you liked, it would on the whole work out in your favor to just always buy the album.
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Never once saw a single on cassette. And I had a lot of cassettes.
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Thus proving they couldn't possibly have ever existed!
Oh, wait, we have google and we can search for "cassingle":
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
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I know they existed. But in the late seventies and the eighties I was constantly in music stores. Music is huge in my life. And they simply weren't there.
Re: Maybe they made more in the 20th century becau (Score:2)
How did anyone buy a single on audio tape or audio CDs or records ??
Singles could only be purchased once internet downloads and streaming came up.
Single were ranked since much earlier based on what was requeated/played on radio
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You could get a mini-CD with a few songs on it. I still have my Coca-Cola mini-CDs. In the past though we could buy a 45 with 2 singles on it. That was much less of an option as CDs became more popular.
I was creating mix tapes back in the 70’s and 80’s with album cuts and 45s and when CDs became more available, I’d create a mix playlist and burn CDs. Once I could actually create a playlist, it was all on a digital device like an iPod.
[John]
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Singles as 45 RPM 7 inch or 12inch records have been around since the 60s at least and are still sold. For a while there were cassingles - a tape with a track or two each side and then there were CD singles which had a single plus remixes/"b side"'s which came in standard and mini sizes. In the UK at least, the charts were based on single sales not radio play
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How did anyone buy a single on audio tape or audio CDs or records ??
At places called "shops".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Maybe they made more in the 20th century beca (Score:2)
You most definitely could buy CD and cassette singles.
https://www.discogs.com/master... [discogs.com]
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Huh?
What exactly were those black things in Wurlitzer jukeboxes? Didn't they sell them to the general public?
What did Americans feed their car record players with?
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
The rest of the world didn't have in-car record players.
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Damn. I have a ton of albums I bought for one or two songs. Still have them.
[John]
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I have a lot of albums that I bought for that one or two songs, and after listening to it many times I now love it for all the others.
And that goes for this era too, I seldom buy single tracks, I buy the album since a good artist have an idea when selecting the songs. But perhaps I am strange that like albums as an experience not songs as earworms.
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Almost no one was stupid enough to pay for an entire album instead of a couple of singles.
Oh yes they were.
It's not exactly "stupidity" though, back then there was almost no way to hear what the rest of the album was like without buying it first.
You'd go to a record shop and see the single (which you like) next to the album. What did you do?
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That rather depends on the band. Iron Maiden either produces great albums with one weak song, or weak albums with decent cover art, but it has never produced an album with only one good song on it. Nightwish seem to be making up for lost earnings by selling multiple versions of the same album (a regular version, a collector's edition, a book version and a vinyl edition). Not that I object to Nightwish making the money they deserve - after Odin quit, the airplay in Valhalla has dropped to a fraction of what
Re: Maybe they made more in the 20th century becau (Score:2)
I know you think that's somehow virtuous but understand that popular and good are not synonyms.
In the hands of the most recent generations there's no chance that the next Pet Sounds or Ziggy Stardust will make it.
Re: Maybe they made more in the 20th century becau (Score:2)
You're the one who's dumb if you bought a CD with just one or two good songs. Unless at least 85% of the songs on an album are good, then album is not worth buying. There are plent of whole albums that are great.
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Did you have a crystal ball to see what the other songs were like before you bought it?
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So unless you are spending hours in a music store that allows you to listen before you buy, how would you possibly know? Back in the day, all you would hear is a track or two on the radio, or MTV, or from a movie soundtrack.
You are presenting a ridiculous circular argument.
Re: Maybe they made more in the 20th century beca (Score:2)
Familiarity with the artists work. You people must listen to some really shit music if you can't enjoy to the majority of the artists album
Re: Maybe they made more in the 20th century beca (Score:2)
BTW. I've never bought an MP3 and I still buy CDs or vinyl on a regular basis. MP3s sound like garbage, I can't stand the sound of swishy cymbals.
Re: Maybe they made more in the 20th century bec (Score:2)
Know the quality of the artist's work.
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...because music was overpriced and paying $20 for a CD with one or two good songs was dumb. Now those bands are only being paid for their one good song and not all of their bad ones also.
Nah, unless they were really big they got screwed then as well. The music industry will always be first in line for the money. And back in the day of records and then CD's, cassette tapes made it easy for share songs off of CDs. Used record stores meant you could buy a used copy, copy it and sell it back. And if yo had a real to real, even make master tapes and mix tapes for parties.
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Or maybe it was priced correctly to the market, where there was far less entertainment competing for each customer's time.
Consider that music as a form of entertainment competes for your time with other sources of entertainment. And then consider how many NEW sources of entertainment there are today to compete for the same time compared to 1999 comparison point in the story. It's not even just variations on fundamentally same entertainment, like youtube vs TV. It's completely novel sources of entertainment,
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The problem is VC and corporate money. They simply got outspent.
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Clinging to the past is an endemic condition in media. The music industry had to be dragged kicking and screaming out of their obsolete business model and into the modern world - they fought every step of the way until they arrived at what we have today - a far more streamlined model where they make more money for less work, and have less grasping hands between their artist and your ears.
There's probably someone still out there that downloads music files from suspect sources, but most people just subscribe
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None of them are using DRM, so it probably didn't help them much directly. But maybe indirectly back when they were the only ones selling unencumbered tracks. It's true that releases through major outlets like Amazon or iTunes are tagged so that ownership/purchase records can be traced from the file if it were widely shared, but that is not DRM.
Revenue per consumer is the problem (Score:3)
I can't imagine living on just a couple albums a month in my early adult years.
Re:Revenue per consumer is the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
I think your fallacy falls by itself:
Quote: "... subscriptions ... $120 a year"
Quote: "... : $120 ... compares to a couple dozen CDs"
And here's your fallacy: if you stop paying $120 a year, you have NOTHING.
Whereas if you buy that couple dozen CDs... if you stop paying, you OWN those CDs.
Streaming is the same scam that NFT. Full stop.
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Not to mention it can always happen that you in fact stream the same albums again and again because that's just your jam.... so you pay 120 a year and could have bought CDs for like 60 bucks instead.
Not to mention that halfway through someone might decide that your jam no longer needs to be available to you.
I have a 16 TB NAS at home... just saying. I pay Amazon Prime for the shipping convenience seeing as whenever I tried actually watching something on Prime, it was not available in Switzerland, only in Ge
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Fellow Swiss here, and yes: the geographical restrictions are incredibly stupid. They make it so difficult to give them your money.
Just last week, I wanted to buy an album for download. The band is well-known worldwide, but no one will let me buy it. Amazon in Germany does have the album, and does offer download - but again, not in Switzerland. Sure, I could open a fake account or something, or play VPN games, but in the end: they don't want my money? There are plenty of pirate sites available. I don't wa
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I chose the best of both worlds.
1. Subscription to a streaming service, because it allows me to pick out of hundreds of thousands of artists.
2. Buying original albums in physical format - but only those launched by the bands I am a fan of (very few, as a matter of fact). I own the complete collection of exactly one band, and a few best albums from several other bands.
3. I bought clothing and stuff from some bands' official stores, which ensure some money goes to those bands directly.
That way, I support band
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Streaming is the same scam that NFT. Full stop.
Not at all. While you pay for the streaming, you get the full value of the service that you are subscribing to.
I pay ~$15/month for four family members to have access to virtually any music we like. For the same amount, buying three CD:s per person per year would make for very boring listening. Now we all have access to new music, old music, explorable music. Even if they would discontinue the service tomorrow, I would consider myself having gotten good value for the money.
Different strokes for different fo
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To be fair there is more to streaming than just listening to some songs you would otherwise have bought on CD. There are curated playlists and a lot of people like those, a bit like how we had a favourite radio station that played stuff we liked back in the day... Except without the annoying DJ.
I'm not sure it's worth $120/year and the artists definitely aren't being paid enough, but my point is merely that streaming offers more than just a substitute for buying a CD/MP3.
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Back in those days we spent around as much on music as we do now. The 90s were an outlier, when everyone and their dog was replacing their vinyl collection with CDs. See this graph (US [visualcapitalist.com]
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And strangely enough, in the 2000's, Vinyl made a bit of a comeback....
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because the folks who replaced their libraries were letting the vinyl go economically enough that some got more into it...
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And now cassettes are back with a vengeance and even new titles on 8Track. Anything to help sell units. My band did an album on miniDisc and are aiming at other "obsolete" formats for other releases
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Considering I built my music collection during the "buy it" days, I now have a music collection that would rival some radio stations, not to mention a few are collectables and have gone up significantly in value.
Back then, $120 a year for music would have been a king's ransom (CD prices have remained somewhat static), and even now is somewhat workable except media stores with cutout bins and used selections have dried up and a lot of costs are eaten up by shipping if shopping online.
Not to mention turning
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CDs cost $10-$20 dollars depending on the artist and how scummy your local record store was. So $120 or 5-12 albums per year for a teen or young 20-something that is into music doesn't seem exorbitant. I bought several albums a week sometimes when I was really getting into music during my formative years.
Re: Revenue per consumer is the problem (Score:2)
Of course you can't. And I guarantee you don't actually extract the full value of the music you do hear.
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Those of us who grew up in the days before CDs made mix tapes. We bought the albums and singles we could, taping off air or off albums other people had everything else. So we didn't live on a couple of albums a month even when that's all we bought. If you want to tell me that, in the days when you could burn your own CDs with no loss of quality, that this never happened, you've a hard time selling it.
Streaming is to go back to cassette (type 1) quality, as in taping off someone else's mix tapes, in a day an
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I was a teen in the transition from cassette to CDs, and we made mix tapes constantly. Almost everyone who was into music had a little all-in-one stereo that had a CD player, stereo, and two tape decks. So you could record from CD, radio, or dub tape-to-tape.
Since a lot of us did not have CD players in our cars yet, we would make mix tapes from our CD collection to play in the car. Even once cassettes were totally out of the picture, my friends and I would make burned mix CDs for house parties and just a
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I can't imagine living on just a couple albums a month in my early adult years.
When I was in the teenage music-buying stage of life, I had limited income but very little to spend it on. Music, books... um and maybe more music and books? I had no social life, so none of that "need the newest clothes" or "go to the movies" stuff.
These days there are so many more diverse entertainment avenues available to teens of all types. Steam, XBox, Playstation, Nintendo whatever. TV streaming services that your parents pay for for you. Point is... the Internet has brought a breadth of entert
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I can't imagine living on just a couple albums a month in my early adult years.
I can, but then I also had a radio.
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Really, I mostly both/and. I don't pay for a music service, but I make a small use out of Pandora and Youtube Music. For movies, you really need a combination plan. You can have every streaming service and there are still movies you can't watch unless you buy it....on DVD. Or even VHS/Laserdisc for the ones that never made it that far. There are shows that have disappeared from Netflix and I was in a region where I couldn't even buy it. The show wasn't even popular enough for piracy to work. I had to
Bad assumptions? (Score:4)
The old music industry wasn't about making lots of music, it was about limiting what was sold to a manageable amount and pushing that.
There was a local radio station that had a contest where bands had to send in a CD album and could nominate a song for the contest but the album had to have been made in the last year. A city of 3 million people had 3,000 entries. That would imply that there could be 8 million bands globally that could produce an album in the last year.
The sales issues of trying to sell 8 million new albums every year is simply incompatible with the existing music business.
Re: Bad assumptions? (Score:2)
Interesting thought. I recently made the point that for all the crap, theft, and skullduggery they brought to the table, the labels did also often act as a filter that kept shitty musicians and songwriters out of the system.
More records lost money than made a profit. The smash hits paid for lots of failed but daring rolls of the dice.
Now anybody can make a make a record available. That's not better.
"Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases thatâ(TM)s where it should stay." - Hitchens
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True, but some of those failed records were superb but under-promoted. It turns out sometimes the dice were loaded.
Yes, more is not better. The Beatles discovered that when they tried to give all artists a helping hand. It's not a workable approach.
The challenge is to figure out how to have good filters without over-filtering, and how to eliminate outright theft and flagrant abuse when artists are unable to take action themselves (no money, high risk of being blacklisted).
In the case of radio, you've still
Piracy was legalised (Score:2)
They call it Spotify now but it's the same thing: people listen to music and the musicians don't get paid.
The record execs have been bribed to look away.
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and for some reason (Score:2)
no one mentioned the other big difference between the pre-streaming era and today: the music people pay for changed, and the demographics of people who pay for music is today very different as well.
not sure exactly why, but anecdotally today's music business appears focused on teenager girls, which certainly was not the case in the 80s and in the 90s. maybe it is the YouTube that replaced some need for other population groups that music used to fill? doesn't matter exactly why; what matters is that with dif
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I'm pretty sure the boy bands of the 90s and the bubblegum pop of the 70s and 80s (Bucks Fizz was not good music) were heavily about the teenage girls. And, lets face it, a lot of the acts of these three decades were aimed at teen girls (ABBA was decent but hardly the height of intellectual) or spotty teenage boys (The Strangler's Battersea Park concert shows that, and the European version of MTV had no problem with strip acts).
Let's look at what the straight-laced, ultra-conservative British were showing o
Music industry is playing the long game (Score:2)
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uBlock origin - I haven't seen a youtube ad on my PC or phone in years. The app on my TV is another story though.
Music (Score:2)
The business of blasting you repeatedly with tunes until one sticks and you feel the need to pay money to get your "fix" again.
Reality is... (Score:2)
... the computer is star trek for movies, music and games, and eliminated scarcity, this should be celebrated, the reality is that there just isn't an infinite market for music.
Good YouTube video on the subject (Score:5, Insightful)
If you've not heard of Jake Tran's YouTube channel, I highly recommend it. He makes 10-20 minute videos that take an extremely cynical view of the financial world today, especially when it comes to specific industries. He made a video summarizing all the problems of the music industry contracts today [youtube.com]. If you don't like watching 18-minute videos, here's a summary:
In the "Good ol' days", times were tough for the artist, but not grueling. Music industry execs signed artists, gave them advances (making them indentured servants), and made made most money off album sales. They also owned the album masters and whatever else was recorded in the studio. Artists would grind through years of work, and a successful album (or two) could pay back the advance. After that, they made a small trickle of money from album sales but made almost all their money off live performances. Artists also owned the performance rights to their songs.
Then came Napster...and streaming...and 20 years later, we now have this new model...
Music industry execs sign artists, give them advances, and make money off everything: album sales, streams, live performances, TV or movie deals, merch...we're taking about every penny of revenue an artist makes while under the slaver...I mean, service of a label, is taxed about 90+ percent before the artist sees anything. The label owns both the masters as well as the performance rights to songs in perpetuity. (You can thank Taylor Swift for that [youtube.com], as explained by Legal Eagle.) The artist gets the advance, which is practically impossible to ever pay back. The artist owns nothing, and never will own anything, because they're buried in debt.
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So what part is new? (Score:4, Interesting)
"The big winners are the streaming services and the large record companies. The losers are the 99 percent of artists who aren't at Beyoncé's level of fame. And they're angry about not sharing in the music industry's success."
The artists who aren't at the very top have always been "angry about not sharing in the music industry's success"
The big difference today is that you technically could succeed without them, if people wanted your music badly enough. It's never been easier to set up a website and charge for downloads. But it turns out that people kind of do like using some standardized music industry to get their music. So the middle man does add value.
There's a saying (Score:3)
---"The big winners are the streaming services and the large record companies. The losers are the 99 percent of artists who aren't at Beyoncé's level of fame. And they're angry about not sharing in the music industry's success."
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
Capitalism’s posterchild (Score:2)
Streaming’s wealth gap reflects precisely how the power of subscription and ranking rents all forms through servers that function to wring wage slavery fractional profit without adding value other than simple access.
It’s simple gatekeeping
Well duh (Score:2)
No freaking shit. They aren't as popular because they are no where near as good.
Popular music is barely about music any more. You have to be hot. You have to twerk if female - you have to speak a message of misandry. or misogyny.
Allow me to show what passes for lyrics today, by the ultimate role model for young women - Beyonce.
From "Formation"
When he fuck me good, I take his ass to Red
Who gets the money (Score:2)
It's all always been completely free (Score:2)
Age 42 here.
Grew up listening to radio on my ghetto-blaster. Not sure if that's a bad word yet. Imagine a phone the size of a car's dashboard, with two speakers the size of your chest, and batteries the weight of a car battery. Now imagine calling that "portable" and being able to fill your entire street with music.
Also had a button: record. Recording radio was always free. Radio was the original streaming service. All curated, all free, all the time!
Today, we have youtube. Still all free all the time
By violating Anti trust law (Score:2)
But MP3.com had done some debatably illegal things briefly at the start of their site. And our legal system always sides with property owners (possession is 9/10ths of the law... yeah I know that's not techincally what the quote means but it's like "we're a right to work state",
Collusion in the CD era (Score:2)
Remember that the music/record industry colluded to keep CD pricies artificially high during the CD era.
Therefore, is logical that:
Even now, the music industry in the United States generates less revenue than at the peak of the CD.
Citation needed?
https://www.ftc.gov/news-event... [ftc.gov]
Not everyone can be Beyonce (Score:2)
Why is there even the assumption that everyone gets to be Beyonce or Taylor Swift or whoever is currently at the top of the charts? Not every artist gets to be Rembrandt or Picasso. Not every actor gets an Oscar. This is Sturgeon's Law in full force. 99% of everything is crap. That applies to music and musicians. Maybe you'll get lucky and be a one-hit-wonder and make enough money that you won't have to work for the rest of your life which isn't all that much if you're smart about your money. But cle
Please distinguish between the music industry and. (Score:2)
musicians. The latter are still getting screwed over royally (over royalties), just as they have been for close to a century.
Let's see the music *industry* ripped apart, and musicians earn what they deserve: a battalion of forensic accountants going through all of the industry's multiple books - you know, they ones they file taxes on, the ones they show the musicians, and the actual ones that the CEOs and other major stockholders see.
Re: (Score:2)
Royalties on recordings are a relatively new innovation that started with Bing Crosby. Before that, the artists just got paid for the recording session.
Recording royalties have always been on shaky ground, as they were made possible only by being able to commoditize music into little plastic disks that could be sold. Artists made the mistake of viewing them as a form of revenue rather than a form of advertising.
While this might be considered unfair, keep in mind the musician is still a beneficiary even if h
The revenue changed, but the costs changed too (Score:2)
There used to be music stores where you actually went too to buy your CDs. These are essentially gone.
That is rent that you don't pay. That's a physical CD and a case that you don't pay. That is delivery of boxes of CDs you don't pay. That's salary of the employees staging the CDs that you don't pay.
The cost is in the last mile. And that last mile cost is essentially gone.
So maybe the artist makes less money, but I have a hard time believing that the system is less profitable.
Re: (Score:2)
" The labels steal 73% of total streaming revenue! "
How much would the label "steal" from a CD sale?
Re: (Score:2)
The labels try to steal that money up front. They'll pay inflated prices to have the songs recorded. The label probably owns the studio anyway. Then the artists have to sell the CDs to pay the label back. Same for touring, promotion, everything else. It can take years to get out of debt from an album release. The "company store" model lives on in the music industry.
Re: (Score:3)
it is very likely that "you" (as in "making music you like") are not a big enough market to warrant going after for the music industry. (I am in the same boat.) I kind of trust their business sense; I don't think they consciously made a decision to make LESS money by catering to the audience that they chose.
there is an interesting conversation to be had with regards to how music SUPPLY affects popular tastes and in turn shapes demand, yet somehow I don't feel they are missing out much by not going after, so
Re: (Score:2)
Netflix makes a killing going for the long tail of niche tastes. In general, though, good quality music / movies / TV shows are not mass marketable. So you have to work a lot of niches to fill out a catalog. Instead of trying to sell one band to everyone - which doesn't really work anymore.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know about a "killing"; they most certainly make "some" revenue, but how does it compare to their competitors at say Disney?
and again, Netflix is a new kid on that block and they can set their company operations according to their strategy. it takes a significant advantage to offset changes in the way big labels / music publishers operate, and it just doesn't look like the necessary market is there yet. maybe in 10-20 years? who knows. until then, vae victis.