The custom ringtone industry paved the way for the app store and then vanished
onezero.medium.com
onezero.medium.com
Consider revenue per song:
- £0 per downloaded song via torrent
- £0.003 per streaming song
- £0.70 - £1 per album song on CD
- £0.99 per song on iTunes
- £0.99 per single song on CD
- £1 per single song on 7"
- £1 per 10 seconds of song in a simplified midi track... equivalent to a per song value far higher
Lesson here if no-one saw it, the more you control the means of distribution and playback, the higher the price you can extract from the listener.
Long-term, when the final vestiges of openly available music vanish (CDs gone, streamed content heavily DRM'd), prices will definitely rise, or at least... those who most control the critical parts of distribution or playback at that time will be able extract the most revenue from the total revenue that exists. I believe that the pressure will be on the labels and artists at this time, and that even with technology helping to reduce the cost of recording and releasing music it's going to be hard on them. The winners are most likely the distributors of music across all platforms - Spotify look like a good bet.
This is the subject of a piece of work I did for the independent music labels in the UK in early 2000s and it's still relevant.
Thankfully the options to simply buy and download music in DRM-free formats are better than ever. So I don't think that prophecy will come true.
No matter how locked down mainstream music gets, there will always be artists who will stand up for open, easy and in some cases free access to their music.
Even if that weren't the case, the final choice is "don't buy that song".
There is always competition, and that will always keep a lid of prices to an extent.
> iPods were generally powered by iTunes sales
I think this is the lionised view of the iPod, but it's not really backed up by the stats or the early marketing ("Rip. Mix. Burn.") which was targeted at folks who were still buying CDs.
Apple sold its 10 millionth iTunes song in September of 2003, and around that time would have sold around 1.5 million iPods (they'd sold 600k in January '03, and announced that they'd shipped 2 million in January '04). So if you assume that all iTMS sales are to iPod owners (as someone who did not own an iPod until around 2007, but bought music on iTunes, I am a very small datapoint that speaks to this not being true!), then the average iPod owner either only had only around 7 songs on their iPod, or iPods were principally powered by CD rips and illegal downloads.
It doesn't change the thrust of your point but I thought you might find it interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#/media/File:Ipod_sales_pe...
Incidentally, cmdrtaco was right about the extant iPod he was actually criticizing. It was lame and that iPod never became popular. He's mocked in retrospect because later revisions of the iPod became massively popular, but the version he was responding to never did.
The initial iPod was basically one of many digital music players available at the time and, as you say, you couldn't even really use it with the desktop computers that had something like 95% market share.
Apple clearly became one of the most successful companies ever, but it's not like that was an inevitability as soon as they released the first iPod.
I quibble one point you made (sorry -- former employees sometimes turn into nitpicking apologists):
> cmdrtaco was right about the extant iPod he was actually criticizing. It was lame and that iPod never became popular.
You're right that this iPod never became as popular as we understand the iPod to have been looking back from 2020, but the implication is that it was held back because of the assessment cmdrtaco made of it:
> No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
Clearly it had no WiFi and a lower capacity than a Nomad, but that would continue to be the case for many years, right up to peak iPod in 2008 when Apple introduced the first iPod with WiFi (iPod Touch 1G). (Apple was never interested in competing on capacity -- a feature -- and actively sought to reframe marketing towards _benefits_, like how many songs or photos the capacity enabled you to hold in your pocket.)
So the absence of WiFi and lower capacity than Creative's lineup did not appear to be limiting factors in the iPod's success. I think they made it lame to cmdrtaco, but each subsequent iPod for the better part of a decade 'suffered' from the same lameness, and did so well that Amazon had precisely two sections for MP3 players for many years: "iPod" and "Non-iPod Music players"!
I believe that the tipping point for iPod came alongside several things: the final refinement to the interaction model (scroll wheel => touch wheel -- the first device is identifiably an iPod but almost ashamedly so, with buttons around the edge of the wheel which ruin the fascia), the miniaturisation of the device (and in particular the ruthless Jobsian cannibalisation of the Mini with the Nano), and the vacuum of competition around iTMS from its launch through 2006 or so.
I think its actually not that unrealistic that the median iPod only had 7 songs on it. I briefly worked on Kindle software and IIRC the median active Kindle was only used to read maybe 3 books or something (but the mean was much higher because there's a very long tail).
I pay for my music. I have had a Spotify subscription for years. They're offering me a product at a reasonable price. You try to extort people and they'll move back to piracy.
I find it far easier than ever before to discover new music. Which leads me to:
> It's much, much harder to make it big as an independent artist these days
My (possibly naive and certainly not backed by any insider knowledge) thinking is, that this is because you have far more than there used to be as the barrier of entry is far lower. I’ve bought music from all kinds of artists than I probably would never even have found even just 10 years ago.
I would bet the exact opposite of your entire comment is true. Instead of a new genre every decade or two, we now have new genres multiple times per decade. It is much easier to make it big as an independent artist thanks to a multitude of large open entry platforms, and there is more money flowing into the music industry than ever.
There are more talented artists in all genres, and thanks to music production hardware/software becoming essentially free a lot of that talent is being adequately produced.
But now DRM on everything is just cool, because the DRM allows tech companies for which the majority of HN works for instead of the big bad scary RIAA and MPAA to control the product and skim off most of the money while adding the least value.
But now that the tech industry is larger, fewer people, as a percentage, care about DRM so it is on books, movies, games, and most else...except music.
Completely true - and the reason why, is because it forced competition on the music industry. Competition that couldn't be bought out. Napster wasn't completely free - it came with the costs legality and a bit of tech know how, but it brought competition to the industry.
And overall it again exposed one of the key points. Free markets dont benefit consumers, competitive markets do. Consumers and society benefits when people are free and capable to successfully enter and exit markets as consumers as they see fit, and when entrepreneurs are free and capable of successfully entering markets as suppliers as they see fit. Locked distribution channels, exclusivity deals and the rest all prevent this. Without competitive markets, you end up with gross-rent seeking.
Competitive markets benefit consumers and society overall, Pure free markets incentivize seeking.
Heavy handed government intervention can eliminate competition in suppliers, however other suppliers are frequently the number one force in current markets eliminating competition in suppliers. And the end result for consumers (as we saw in the record industry) is just as bad.
If we're arguing against regulatory capture, and government limiting market efficiency, then we need to be arguing just as strongly against exclusivity deals, locked distribution channels and moats.
If a tower is teetering one way, giving it a shove so it's now teetering just as far another way is no better when we want it to stand balanced.
Trading govt enabled rent-seeking for industry enabled rent seeking is in no way a win for consumers or society.
And arguing the benefits of free markets while ignoring the fact they aren't competitive due to industry moat building tactic is hypocritical.
But I also spent many hours on GoldWave 4.x mixing my own mp3 ringtones for years and still enjoy picking out a good riff when I hear it. I have a nice section of Eric Clapton's Layla looped as well as some Chilli Peppers, the Doors intro to Love me 2 Times, the sax on Born to Run + Quite a few more.
More difficult to go to the store?
Also, 8-track tapes?
Total speculation.
It's right about when the "Home Taping Is Killing Music" campaign came about.
CDs didn't arrive in large numbers until the mid 80s.
I got my first cd for christmas 1994 as a kid and I was kind of in the middle of adoption. Middle-class family in Germany. Some friends of mine already had CD players, but not all.
MCs were still everywhere, but I can't really comment on how much people actually spent.
I simply can't believe that the 1990-92 numbers are true in an adoption sense, or maybe the revenue was just a lot better than for MCs, because I honestly don't know anyone who had a meaningful CD collection in 1990 already. And this is not because I was too young (see above, first CD in 94) but even my friends' parents didn't have CDs from the 80s, later in the 90s.
Within a few years, my parents had added one to their hifi system, as did most other families I knew. Well before I graduated high school in '92, I had added a 10-disc changer to my bedroom hifi, using my own odd job cash from paper routes, lawn mowing, etc. It was some kind of scratch/dent item I got from the local home electronics store, and I think it cost me less than my first walkman from the mid-80s.
I might have only owned two dozen CDs by then, still having a lot more music on tapes. I can't remember for certain whether the "record clubs" that kids got into for vinyl LPs also existed for CDs, but I suspect they did.
Also that's revenue.
I didn't check, but isn't Compact Disc an industry standard and registered trademark, that required payment? So, there would be revenue associated with hardware sales which would front load the figures??
That chart needs an overall revenue area, and an items sold overlay to make it really useful.
In the mid-nineties, my cool friends with money had huge collections of CDs and listened to a lot of music. It was not uncommon to see shelves with scores of CDs proudly displayed in the living room next to an expensive stereo system.
By the early 2000s that was gone, replaced by a DVD player, the largest TV they could afford, and a stack of DVDs. Maybe a game console or two as well. All the disposable income that a decade earlier was being poured into music was now going toward the film and gaming industries.
Sure there was plenty of piracy but I would argue not enough to explain the drop.
But yes, every year or three there are more places to put your money.
There had been generations of format replacements-- cylinders to 78 to 45 to 33, reel-to-reel to weird cartridges and 8-track, then onward to compact cassette, but the CD ended up being the last meaningful physical audio format.
It's durable enough that people aren't having to re-buy their favourites after they unspool in the player, or the groove was reamed out by a heavy tonearm. It's high-fidelity enough that a replacement format won't make a sonic difference on most consumer grade equipment. It's convenient enough that people didn't need to buy another format as a compromise for portable play.
This meant all past business models for music consumption were going to fail as CDs reached saturation. You're not going to be selling a lot of classic albums anymore. The only way to go forward would have been an endless supply of new content, but then we get to the matter of attention and shelf space being finite.
Sure, Napster may have been pulled the trigger, but it shot an uindustry that was already on the verge of a massive coronary.
For a snapshot, a brief moment in time, sure. But notice what the article points out- this business is gone, gone, gone. It is possible to think on longer timeframes than one transaction, one offering.
Lesson here if parent missed it, provide actual value if you want to exist for longer than a moment.
Someone once told me he made $60 an hour doing the easiest job of his life. I asked what it was, and he told me someone paid him one dollar to watch their seat for one minute. Not a bad rate- not a sustainable one either.
Artists can make money with concerts so they will pay you to become part of your life. Even now, youtube is already playing entire songs as advertisement. Why should it stop there?
The only answer is less engagement.
I do, however, think that we should reduce monopolistic behavior by platforms to enhance gains to content producers and consumers. I also think that the government should provide a better safety net, so that content producers don't have to lose several years of their life to a miserable, existential slog with the hope of stardom. It might still be a slog, but it doesn't have to be so miserable (no government health insurance is a big factor in America).
One minute of incredibly low quality audio from popular songs stored in a physical cartridge, with a dedicated player.
The 90s had some wild ideas for music monetization.
As phones became more sophisticated, it was easier for teens to snip audio from anywhere, convert it to whatever their phone used, and bypass ringtone stores altogether. _Very few_ adults customized their ringtones, and usually stuck to what shipped with the phone (or got their nephews to install a specific one they cared).
I also blame the Marimba ringtone on the iPhone — it became a sort of status symbol to let other people know you had an iPhone.
Plus there were dozens of utilities to take MIDI files and whatnot and turn them into semi-proprietary formats even before the iPhone came about.
But there is a large chunk of truth in the fact that people simply outgrew ringtones altogether, although these days video calling apps (Whatsapp/Teams/FaceTime) all have distinctive tones.
Oh, and the preferred capitalisation was "Vodafone live!" gotta have exclamation mark , or the brand police will get you ;-)
I think this is the real reason why.
I hate the marimba ringtone for that reason too lol.
It’s just amazingly stupid, and in 2020 there’s literally no excuse for such a software shortcoming.
I’m not sure that statement is ever true for any value of <x>, as any task in iTunes is non trivial given what a painful experience using iTunes is.
That said, I can confirm the rest of the point, having made custom ringtones and pushed them to my iPhone on a few (painful) occasions.
It never occurred to me that iTunes should be required for anything, seeing as I haven’t used that piece of software for 10+ years. I suspect that applies to most iPhone owners these days as well.
As such this is trivial in the same way finding the news about the interstellar highway in “Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy” is trivial. That is, not at all.
And I have such traumatic memories about iTunes with it randomly wiping my iPhone several times a month 10 years back, there’s no fucking way I’m ever going to use that software again.
This needs to be solvable on the iPhone itself.
Step 1: create an aac-encoded file with the .m4r extension to its name
Step 2: connect phone to Mac and drag and drop .m4r file on to iPhone on desktop
Step 3: there is no step 3
For those who want to do this without needing a Mac or PC there are apps that will do the job as well.
I know macOS Store subscription management is, hilariously enough, still just in Music app. (I wanted to cancel MS Office subscription - for Mac! not for iPhone! - and I needed to do that in Music app.)
For years my ringtone was the sound of the TARDIS taking off.
AxelF's Crazy Frog, from 2005, was peak ringtone in the UK to my recollection.
> The phone turned out to be an abject user experience failure. It had a 100 song limit regardless of how much space you actually had left, and it was painfully slow at uploading songs from iTunes. Crucially, you couldn’t use it to buy ringtones or music remotely
I'm fairly sure that was a carrier-imposed limitation.
However much Apple's store looks like a monopoly now, we should also recognise that Apple did a lot to fight the awfulness of anti-features imposed by carriers on phones so they could sell the feature back to you at monopoly prices.
And the Apple 30% cut looks reasonable compared to a traditional music industry 70% cut ..
As I recall (details fuzzy), He had to pay a substantial fee to the carriers in order for his app to be quality reviewed. If it failed, then he would gave to pay again. For each phone they supported, an extra fee was required. Also extra fees for different carriers, even if it was for a device already approved by another carrier.
Simply... in the days when the carriers ruled the waves, there was no profit in a healthy app dev community. In the UK, my first experience of a healthy app eco-system came with the dawn of the Palm Pilot.
I didn't feel the jump to a "smart phone" was particularly big at the time, actually.
I'm pretty sure I've downloaded a bunch of games on my Sony Ericsson K700/750i/800. I believe they were just Java (jar) files that you download from some semi-shady-looking website that usually used a .mobi domain via a very expensive mobile data connection.
Granted, that's just a couple of years before the original iPhone, but I believe that the first iPhone that came with the App Store was 3G.
I did buy a ring tone one from the apple store or itunes, whatever it was. Immediately thought it was a waste of a dollar.
I now realize the best ringtone is one that is nondescript and has no other associations.
There was also confusion around copyright issues, with some characters seemingly thinking that "under 30 seconds" of copyrighted music was fair-game.
I also remember when you could make custom iPhone ringtones in Garageband and easily transfer via iTunes, though that feature seems to have vanished(?).
They abandoned the SMS business mostly, and in this light I find the rise of Twillio/Messagebird remarkable.
I don't know if that was a fair impression of a whole industry but I wasn't going to risk it.