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Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

1999 Revenue > USD40 Billion

If I'm understanding this article correctly, then the revenue for 2018 should be somewhere around USD9.2 Billion.

Wow. I had never seen actual numbers on what revenue digital actually brings in before. And these numbers are total revenue. Before expenses and such.

I can only hope that in this carnage it was the record labels that lost share size in the pie and the artists got a larger piece. But somehow I think what's more likely is that the record labels just started splitting the pie with the tech companies. Or the tech companies became the record labels in some instances. Probably very few of the artists started getting a larger share of the pie in this changeover.

It's sad to look at. I guess they make the music for the love of the art anyway, but it'd be nice to see them get rewarded for it.

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> It's sad to look at

From 40 billion revenue down to 9 billion revenue. But what if costs shrank to zero? That's an exaggeration, sure. But the cost of producing music is less than it was in 1999. The cost of distributing music is significantly less. The cost of promoting music is probably similar or a little less.

In any case, as you see elsewhere in this thread -- professional artists earn their living by doing live performances. Their labels tend to make a lot of the money from sales, little of that is left for the artists.

> the cost of producing music is less than it was in 1999

Or maybe not. The structure of the cost might be different though. Take K-Pop for example

> Among the hundreds of entertainment companies producing KPOP groups, each year around 300 debuts are planned, only 50 of which actually get to debut and 1 or 2 whom become successful during their rookie years.

> Debuting a group (including making albums and things like that) costs an average of $1.8 million with a minimal cost of $1.3 million.

> the bear minimum for KPOP MVs is an average of one million dollars. MVs coming out of the big three agencies (SM, JYP and YG) would probably be heaps more expensive.

https://www.allkpop.com/forum/threads/how-much-does-kpop-cos...

Its been a long time since recordings paid artists very well. The money has long been in touring. If anything, I think the rise in streaming where you can pick whatever you want makes discovering new music a challenge...which reduces the primary way artists used to move from unknown to known. At the same time because its easier to get your music available to a larger audience I suspect the long tail is much longer than ever before.

That's not been my experience, and that of many people around me.

I'm pretty 'vanilla' when it comes to my listening habits. Most of the artists I listen to were famous enough already to show up on my radar, and then there are a number of artists I discovered through word of mouth or attending music festivals. Aside from a few people in my network who often provide me with new artists to follow, my approach seems pretty common in my network.

But since I started using Spotify, the range of artists that I come across, follow, or become a fan of, has increased. The total count of artists I listen to in a given week is much higher than it used to be, and I'm much more likely to attend a performance when they're in town.

Of course that doesn't mean artists get paid more, but as far as listening and attending performances, my impression is that it's much better now for 'unknowns' than it used to be.

(obviously this doesn't mean the chances of a random artist/band becoming successful have increased, it just indicates that the chances of this becoming so is less dependent on obvious gate-keepers. I'm sure those in the know can point out many obstacles to becoming successful that are not directly related to the quality of the music)

I have a couple of acquaintances who play in metal bands, and from their perspective, CD/download sales and streaming are secondary to touring. At concerts you get to engage directly with your fans and build a connection and a rapport that you just can't get from listening to a recording.

The very best thing you can do to support your favorite artists is to go to their concerts, and buy a t-shirt or some other merch while you're there. Nearly as supportive is buying downloads and merch through services like Bandcamp, where they majority of the money you pay goes directly to the artists.

Just in my little country of less than 6 million people, we have three big annual metal festivals, multi-day affairs with good coverage of both international and local bands. There has also been a marked increase in the number of smaller festivals that specialize in local niche bands with some international bookings, as well.

And that's just from the metal scene, my primary sphere of interest. We also have one of the largest and oldest general music festivals in Europe (Roskilde) and countless smaller fests. Accounting for all genres, not a week goes by without at least one festival being held somewhere, in a country where train travel from literally one end to the other takes just ~10 hours.

The festival scene has really exploded over the last 10-15 years.

I don't work around this industry, but it seems to me you are right. I've wondered about the value added by the record labels since the emergence of the internet. It seems that the value of labels used to be production, promotion, and distribution, all of which have been massively simplified in the last 20 years. Perhaps can fans now have a more direct relationship with the artists, and the economics can be further improved by elimination of the intermediate party (record labels).

There are a LOT more festivals in my country then there were in the 90s. And its a lot easier to gain some fame and book a concert venue.

The days of snorting cocaine in studios for months and making concept albums are over. Its back to traveling around and entertaining people. Worked for thousands of years.

Touring is expensive and has a certain number of fixed costs.

While popular artists indeed can make a killing touring, it costs money for those playing smaller venues, or god forbid, playing as an opening act.

Labels have a tour marketing budget to cover the expense of building a following on the road.

I don't have the graph of music industry revenue, but if you take the long view, the 90s and early '00s were an anomalous golden period for revenue. 1999 would have been about the very peak itself. Effectively, with the introduction of CDs, the record industry discovered they could churn out crap, force people to buy the crap with the hits, and charge them for the crap as if it were hits, and people would meekly pay for it. When digital music and à la carte came along, that business model was not sustainable, and the industry is forced to return to its older and less lucrative business model.

>1999 Revenue > USD40 Billion

Where's that number from? The RIAA's own numbers put 1999 at $14.6B: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/.

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