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Comment by texasbigdata | Hacker News Reader

I believe, but can't cite, for medium to large artists that streaming is <15% of revenue. Restated, selling merch at a show (back in the day) is so much powerful it overwhelms.

That's why Taylor Swift has such extensive and stadium sized concerts for example. Assuming she's a normal human being on the road for 9 months straight sounds pretty miserable. The financial return must outweigh it.

Edit: it's also shocking to see how large the song writing teams are for certain artists. I tried counting (across all verticals so songwriters, mixers, mastering engineering's, etc etc) how big the teams publicly acknowledged were for two vanilla pop artists: Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran. Now this is across multiple albums so perhaps overstated, but after a tedious tally I stopped after getting to 200 FTEs. For each. Music might be beautiful but it's borderline impossible to be "big" without a gigantic team behind you.

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> I stopped after getting to 200 FTEs

Where are you getting FTE? The specialties you reference (mixers, engineers) are not full-time employees of the artist. Not by a long shot. They are gig workers, basically.

> That's why Taylor Swift has such extensive and stadium sized concerts for example. Assuming she's a normal human being on the road for 9 months straight sounds pretty miserable. The financial return must outweigh it.

For reference, she pulled in $100 million in 2018, the year of her last major concert tour. In 2020 she made just $23.8 million, only 10 of which was from streaming [1]. She is consistently one of the top streamed artists in the world, and was ranked as the highest paid musician in both 2018 and 2020.

So yes, touring is a huge revenue generator for music artists, even beyond just merch sales. It's even more important for artists that cannot rely on top tier streaming or physical sales numbers.

> it's also shocking to see how large the song writing teams are for certain artists.

When the songwriting and production credits for a track look like a laundry list of names pulled from a hat, that's good evidence of Song Factory writing with little to no involvement from the performing artist. This is very common in the popular music industry but there are exceptions, such as with Taylor Swift. For her and other artists that emphasize "singer-songwriter", you are likely to see only 1 co-writer, whom also serves as producer, for several tracks.

Besides the character of the music itself, this has consequences for compensation, as there are less people to split the earnings to. Then there is masters ownership. One of the reasons Taylor eeked out the top spot for highest paid musician in 2020, is because she now owns the masters to her recent albums (which are also her most streamed). This entitles her to a significantly bigger cut. Most music artists do not own their own masters (on top of often not writing their own songs).

> it's borderline impossible to be "big" without a gigantic team behind you.

This is certainly still true but maybe less so than in the past. At least, artists can "get big" (be discovered) without much of a team because of the likes of streaming and TikTok. Staying big, and musically relevant, probably still does require a big team. Making a living from your music, much less becoming actually rich (and staying that way unlike the likes of M.C. Hammer and TLC), is some kind of voodoo magic.

1. https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/news/taylor-swift-to...

This is patent nonsense. You think selling merchandise at the show creates more money then selling the actual tickets to the show?

That's ludicrous. The most successful product people who make music have, by far is selling people the experience of listening to that music, either in person or via recordings.

Sorry I apologise. Everything non-streaming vs streaming alone by itself. That's a good catch on your part, my bad.

It makes more money for the artist. The promoter generally pays a fixed fee to the artist to play, rents a venue, and bears the risk on ticket sales. The band has to pay the road crew, etc. and pay for food and buses, and what have you. The label gets by far most of the money from album/streams.

The merch table is one person (maybe 2-3 for big bands) selling stuff with margins of hundreds of percent.

None of this is true. For reference I worked in this business for about 15 years and represented dozens of famous musicians you've heard of. I also was a touring musician myself in a band nobody ever heard of, and have also worked on the talent buyer/promoter side of things.

Did you know that outside of tiny bar level gigs nearly all deals for bands to play live involve a split of the actual ticket sales between artist and promoter? Did you know that above the bar level the venues actually handle, and take a substantial percentage of, the merch sales?

And so on. I don't know what it is about music but for some reason there's like a tradition in online forums of people going on and on about the nuances of the financial deals in the music industry by people who have absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

> Did you know that above the bar level the venues actually handle, and take a substantial percentage of, the merch sales?

You're referring to large amphitheater and arena shows, for big artists. This isn't (necessarily) true of most touring acts.

It's true of basically every concert that has actual tickets, like where you can buy a ticket, rather than a simple bar with a cover charge.

For all it's worth, I've arranged bar level gigs where there's a ticket at the door and it's split between the bands and promoter/band, bar takes a small percentage of merch sells and band takes a small percentage of drink sales (this one is the hardest to negotiate on my experience). So you are even more in the right and the account you are replying to is even more in the wrong, from my experience.

>I don't know what it is about music but for some reason there's like a tradition in online forums of people going on and on about the nuances of the financial deals in the music industry by people who have absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

I suspect this is 2 factors: 1) music is something people care about, therefore they have opinions on it (whether or not these are justified). And 2) Gell-Mann Amnesia: You're familiar with music, so you quickly spot the bullshit that, in reality, suffuses almost all online discussions.

Why is it so hard to get a t-shirt out of the bands I love? I'd absolutely love to pay $15 for an album again, only this time I want a cool t-shirt instead of the CD :).

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