Global music market grew by 18.5% in 2021, driven by paid subscription streaming
ifpi.org
ifpi.org
Sometime in the next year or two, we will see the first truly independent music superstars achieve household-name status. Once that veil is broken, then the jig is up and labels are going to be panicking -- if they're not already.
In late 2020, a band called Sub-Radio had a couple thousand followers on each social media platform and around ~15k monthly listeners on Spotify, and this was after many years of working extremely hard and even touring the US. Among many things, my primary advice to them was to start live streaming, particularly on Reddit. By the time 2021 arrived, they had more than tripled their social media presence and doubled their listener count. The continued to stream on Reddit throughout the year before recently switching to TikTok, and in the process garnered over 1 million new followers, 150k monthly listeners, sold out an entire US tour and their music is being licensed left and right.
That's just one example of countless many, and it's the way the entire industry is moving. If you're not on board with that, then you're behind the times, because you don't need a million dollar music video budget to become famous and you never did. Financial support has always been a very well-understood con by the record labels, as it allows them to assume ownership over music rights under the guise of "necessary promotional activities."
Additionally - 15k monthly listeners on Spotify is a pretty great starting point. Most indie artists, regardless of quality, will struggle ever even reach that without a lot of outside help (or luck).
And specifically to your emphasis on needing funding, that's just not the case anymore. Everything is cheap. You can live stream from your phone in 480p with a $20 ring light, and fans of the content will still throw money at you. It happens all day long on Twitch.
> Additionally - 15k monthly listeners on Spotify is a pretty great starting point. Most indie artists, regardless of quality, will struggle ever even reach that without a lot of outside help (or luck).
Again though, that was after almost a decade of gigs and touring and marketing. All it took was opening their eyes to those series of opportunities that platforms provide, and then applying all of their effort toward those instead of pursuing the traditionally prescribed music industry path.
This is seeing the survivors. Even if there are 100 new big YouTube channels per year for some saturated niche. That number might practically speaking basically mean zero if 10 million people every year earnestly try to succeed in that niche. The hit rate on this example is 1 in 100K.
In the past the only way to do that was to get the backing of these massive capital pools, and dance when and where they say dance, all to get a little trickle down to that artist. Even if that fame resulted in fortune, it was still the smallest piece of the pie.
When someone has X subscribers paying $Y/month directly to them, with fairly low overhead costs of their content creation, they simply aren't going to be in other parts of the workforce and definitely aren't going to be begging labels, because its good enough for most for the time being.
So it doesn't really matter about the saturation in the same way you assumed.
The question was whether any artist can become a massive success without a record label. 10 years ago this didn't even make sense to ask. Today, I can almost believe it.
I think the goal from the artists perspective is to reach the most people while reducing advertising costs.
The goal for the consumer is to be able to easily get the music they like at low costs. This is getting met, but I'd like to see the costs lowered. (consumer bias)
Currently the environment is benefiting early entreprenuers of streaming platforms. The costs are lowering for artist which is also good.
I'd like to see the balance to continue to shift more to the artists, but not to the point where one artist can dominate over another.
If everyone starts live streaming reddit and tiktok, what will make certain groups stand out versus others? I would guess there would be an opportunity for paid promotion, maybe by Reddit or TikTok themselves.
Not that there is anything wrong with considering success to be whatever you achieve without outside funds trying to promote you, it all simply depends on personal goals and what you are willing to give up to gain an edge.
I've quite literally never once seen a musician expend effort toward learning marketing and business without finding success.
I also don’t know all your marketing knowledge. Maybe you know a whole set of things I am completely unaware of.
What I do know is success as an artist seems to be a weird blend of savvy, talent, luck … and who knows what else.
I have a bad reaction when people make blanket statements like you are doing, because it has a hint of victim blaming.
You initially added nothing to the conversation, except for a very brief and vague claim about how you may know some people who contradict my own experiences. So, I'm not sure what kind of response you were hoping for, but a little snark never hurt anyone, and you're overreacting to it.
If you have an actual example of a musician who studied marketing and business but was unsuccessful, I'd love to hear about it, because I've simply never seen it happen.
I genuinely think you might have access to knowledge or perspective I lack, and I would be very curious whether there are specific materials or resources you would recommend.
It seems like many markets and industries are initially dominated by indie, creator-driven work, but then gradually as they mature and become more commodified, agencies and corporations start to dominate. Look at YouTube-style streaming, or digital game distribution.
All of my close musician friends generally have teams that deal with those sorts of things, but not necessarily from their label (although the more famous ones playing large rooms/stadiums definitely go through their labels).
Indie bands have always done this grind on their own -- I remember all the shows at Glasslands and the lofts and bars around Brooklyn 15 or so years ago, which were in that 150-300 cap range. Or my friends' college bands back in the early 2000s. Labels definitely weren't involved with any of that, it was just a bunch of musicians in a rented van driving to cities crashing on couches. Once you start playing 1000+ cap rooms (or stadiums, in the case of a few friends), the administrative part takes more time than the music part, and I don't really know any artists that care to deal with that. You need lawyers, tour managers, PR people, etc.
It definitely doesn't take a major label like it used to, but an indie label that can support you in that work is often necessary.
These are massively different economies of scale than the labels deal with. Unless we see technological breakthroughs that make scaling easy for a DIY musician, the labels look well protected for the next generation.
You're mistaken and only thinking in terms of major labels and Beyonce. There are thousands of indie labels working at that small scale, along with countless major label "baby bands" (as they call them).
> Unless we see technological breakthroughs that make scaling easy for a DIY musician, the labels look well protected for the next generation.
The entire premise of my original comment was about how technology has made scaling easy for independent musicians. It's already happening. That's the whole conversation we're having here.
Which definitely does seem like a missed opportunity for the streaming platforms. Maybe one of them needs to step up with the equivalent of Stream's Greenlight programme— an opportunity to temporarily have your stuff listed alongside the AAA content, and if it hits whatever the numbers are, they'll buy it from you?
I was led to a oddly human travel show and watched it go from a few thousand to millions of subscribers over the past couple years, they were recently on the Ukrainian / Russian border the day before the invasion talking to locals and ended up leaving on a refugee train in 1080p60, 3+ million views.
Questionable character I don’t want to promote and some of the episodes I don’t want to be associated with, but that’s tvesque isn’t it?
Repeat for true crime, history, cooking, children, educational, political commentary, informercials…
This. Just look at TLC, one of the biggest R&B groups of their time, and yet they were personally broke.
Record labels that the likes of “Sub-Radio” are suited to have always be and will continue to act as taste makers and curators, and not large money making organisations (and for the better). Even the large indies like Sub Pop, Stones Throw, and K7 operate in completely different seperate financial and reach realms than Universal, Warner and the like.
If someone becomes “Tik Tok famous” overnight then they’re likely to seek management and guess who that manager is most likely to be aligned to? Major labels aren’t going anywhere.
I said 150k unique listeners, not streams. Also, you're entirely wrong about this. The 100k-250k range is a very distinct tier of band, and those bands are ubiquitously on record labels. So, your insistence that labels aren't even interested in them is the exact opposite of reality.
> Record labels that the likes of “Sub-Radio” are suited to have always be and will continue to act as taste makers and curators, and not large money making organisations (and for the better). Even the large indies like Sub Pop, Stones Throw, and K7 operate in completely different seperate financial and reach realms than Universal, Warner and the like.
They operate at different scales because of the overall size of the rosters and the major label's ability to literally throw away cash at every turn just to maintain superiority. That doesn't mean major labels don't manage projects that are operating at smaller scales, because they absolutely do. They're called "subsidiaries" and they fit directly in the category that you're pretending doesn't exist.
> Major labels aren’t going anywhere.
Nobody said they were, so your entire argument was made with a false premise. The point was that they aren't necessary anymore.
This is the important thing for labels to focus on in the future. The actual logistics around the physical world is something you cannot handle if you are also seeking time to record new music and practice. On the web however things are getting easier for everyone and the value proposition of record labels vanishes.
It is, and increasingly, but not obviously.
Labels have money and power. If you have enough money and/or power, you can always be some form of gatekeeper. It used to be studio access. Nowadays that's increasingly a commodity. What is increasingly more expensive is attention, so the labels shifted towards being publishers, building their own channels of distribution, to provide ears and eyes to artists in need.
If an artist has already broken through the wall, and has the attention, labels are in a very awkward position, in terms of their value proposition.
> Artists can get much further than before but going viral on TikTok is not a viable career strategy for most artists.
Which bring us to this part: There is no viable career strategy for most artists, period.
Artists obviously don't wanna believe that, so they think of labels as the solution to their issues (they are not).
Labels on the other hand only need artists that they think do maybe have a viable career strategy. The bigger the label, the more able and willing they are to take high risk/high reward bets, but relatively a lot less so than they did years ago, simply because it's not necessary anymore because of the dramatic democratisation of access to music production quality.
Put simply: Labels want artist that don't need them, but also don't realise, that they don't need them. In 2022, if you are an artist, and labels are getting terribly interested, you are probably a lot closer to not needing them than you think.
Your options have either been to fight and more than likely fail (or succeed with one viral song and then fail) or give in a join them. However recently, the tide has been turning because labels haven't figured out how to gatekeep things like TikTok (yet).
You don't need a label to distribute your music on major music services. https://www.tunecore.com/
That being said, the real challenge for independent artists is getting "blessed by the algorithm," so to speak, where they actually start showing up in Song Radio and Discover Weekly algorithmic playlists. I'm not keen on the details of the Spotify algorithm, but I imagine labels do help with this, and being on the same label as a popular artist would increase your chances of showing up on that artists' song radio.
This mindset is unfortunately why most musicians fail to gain traction. Relying on an algorithm for success is fallacy, because all of these algorithms are based on input, not random chance. If you're not steadily supplying new listeners through your own direct efforts, then the algorithm isn't going to perceive value and you won't get any benefits from it. Playlisting represents approximately 1% of the independent music industry puzzle.
Parent may have been referring to promotional deals (getting onto official Spotify playlists, Discover Weekly, etc) or special royalty rates. The major labels have tons of leverage, and they definitely cut deals that entry-level artists don't have access to.
First 2 Eleven is a YouTube cover band who I believe are still fully independent and
On the streaming side, musicians like Danielle Allard are killing it, though sometimes in a scenario like this it's unclear if it's even the goal of the person to "go mainstream" vs just carving out a cozy and sufficiently monetized space to achieve financial stability and practice their craft.
I've not heard of the others, but Tessa is on a label, T∆G Music, which has a global distribution deal with a subsidiary of Sony. She launched her career on the Make Music label as well.
How many self sustained artists in the music industry are there, comparing against the self-claimed ones?
Thing is that - in order to be relevant, and play that role - labels need to actually develop a style and expertise in the specific genre/type they want to operate in.
That's simply untrue. The vast majority of curating and playlisting is through bloggers or social media personalities and not through labels, so I'm not sure where you got that from.
> Otherwise you're just sending your demo to a blog and hoping it might get listened to in the same way you would have sent it to a college radio staton 30 years ago.
What do you think the record label is doing when they contact a curator or radio station? It's the exact same as if a musician had contact them. It's an email to a person, who makes a decision based on the content.
It’s their job to have existing relationships with the bloggers, they aren’t just sending cold emails. And I’d they don’t have relationships they can built them thanks to the credibility they have naturally compared to Jim for some cool indie band sending random emails.
Not sure about this. Maybe for big music fans, but most casual listeners aren't reading music blogs. They're throwing on spotify playlists which allow artists to pay to get boosted. Guess what, it's the major label artists that can afford those payments. They're seeing that their favorite tiktoker made a video with some new band. Guess what, the tiktoker was paid by a label to use that music.
You're also being very conspiratorial by pretending that all playlists and TikTok users are being paid to place music. It does exist, but is not even remotely as ubiquitous as you're pretending.
This is a solid but niche market. There is no conspiracy. But distribution is hard. Getting a few thousand listeners is different from serving hundreds of millions.
Before this was the Napster era, then the MySpace era, then the SoundCloud era, and now the TikTok era. Somehow those damned labels keep figuring out.
That’s not true any more.[0]
0. https://jolt.richmond.edu/2018/03/15/has-the-riaa-given-up-o...
So, they tend to go after businesses with predictable and large incomes, that are dependent on music, to varying degrees, for generating that income.
Peloton, for example, were sued into a royalty contract with the major labels [1]. It's a fun coincidence that their new CEO is the former Netflix and Spotify CFO.
Spotify wasn't sued, because their predecessors were sued into a merger [2][3]. Instead, they acquiesced [4]. The LTV:CAC ratio on this customer was super high.
[1]: https://exploration.io/exploration-weekly-peloton-and-nmpa-s...
[2]: https://www.wired.com/2000/04/riaa-wins-suit-against-mp3-com...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.co....
[4]: https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/19/8621581/sony-music-spotif...
This is the third time that you've responded to one of my comments with personal theories and ideologies, but with no apparent knowledge of the subject at hand, all in an attempt to "prove me wrong" about something that you can't actually articulate. You appear to desperately want to "win" an argument against me, and while maybe I should be flattered by that, I really just find it creepy and disturbing. Please stop.
Many people disagreed with you skimming the thread again. Seeing what I replied to from you. Your posts are fully personal ideologies. Your POV comes from you as one person and assume your pov is obviously correct.
> are the "distributors and creators of pirated content" not pirates? You are being pedantic to an extreme, while still being entirely wrong in the process.
I pointed all this out in my post. Your writing implied that. I specifically said there’s a way those words are thought of to the general person. You using it the way you did was deceptive and biased.
Labels sell polished, high-value tracks to listeners, marketing services to artists, and to pay for this, they need a large market, broad appeal, and residual revenue. That's just not a match for TikTok. It's not that they're being disintermediated, it's that there isn't any value left for a middleman with short-lived, low-value niche products.
> Also, labels have so much infrastructure for marketing, merch, booking shows etc.
No, they actually really, genuinely don't. They use the exact same channels that independent musicians do. Booking agencies, merch providers, publicists -- all of them are hirable by anyone, not just labels. Everything you think that labels do, they hire someone else to do that, and then tell you that they need to keep ownership of your music to recoup those costs. That is how the music industry has worked for a hundred years, and if you disagree with that, then go read literally any book on the subject.
My prediction is that there's a pendulum back-swing in progress as people figure out how to offer brand-management-as-a-service without just becoming a label.
That said, all of those professional services are directly hirable by any musician, without the need for a label middleman. The best move a band can make, is hire someone to handle the thing they least want to do. As you mentioned, posting on social media is the most hated of all tasks for a lot of folks, and in that situation your first hire should be a publicist (aka social media manager). It gets the largest monkey off your back, and frees up that time for all of the other business stuff that still needs to get done.
That said, you could also hire a publicist for a day, and they could assemble a social media schedule for you, and provide a bunch of templates to use, and take all of the mystery out of what to post and when and how and why. And now instead of paying a retainer or sharing gross, you're paying someone in the band to do it, and all of the money stays with the group.
As for your prediction, you're correct about that, as well, because it's already starting to happen. Many people, like myself, offer a sort of label/manager on-demand service, where for a very small consultation fee, the band gets a monthly analysis of where they're at and what steps they need to be taking, along with all of the granular instructions on how to accomplish those tasks. If I had to guess, there are currently about 1,000 people doing this around the world, but that number is growing rapidly. There are also a lot of tools springing up to help simplify those tasks.
As for learning, YouTube is your best friend. There's a mountain of music business content on there, and most of it is very accurate to reality.
https://www.youtube.com/c/berkleemusic/videos
I have a point, I am not being pedantic. The message of your post, or at least, the message I took away from your post, was that the tides are turning against labels and independent musicians are the future...
...but that's been the claim made for at least the last decade, and it's proven again and again to be untrue. Yes, independent artists can reach huge levels of success without a label, and certainly it's becoming easier and easier to achieve success without a label, however, that doesn't have any logical through line to music labels becoming irrelevant.
Artists like Macklemore are great examples of independent artists who reached great success but still chose to work with labels, because labels provide value. Likewise, there are many successful independent artists who sign with major labels, even some of the artists people pointed to as independent examples in this thread have gone on to sign with labels.
I will happily make a bet with you, and you can choose the metric: in 5 years, major record labels will be doing better than they are today. My metric of choice would be total revenue as measured by the IFPI, but I'm open to other metrics if you think total revenue as measured by the IFPI isn't a fair representation.
Although I don't work in the music industry, I have participated in this discussion many times over the years, including conversations with major label artists. Historically, record labels were gatekeepers and it's fantastic to see the shifts in consumer habits that have enabled independent artists to succeed, I would not dispute that for one second, and I will happily celebrate it alongside you, but the last decade has disproven the anti-label thesis again and again. Labels and independents will co-exist, they will grow together.
If your comment was focused entirely on the success of independents, I wouldn't have had anything to say. I would have just given an upvote, because I agree wholeheartedly.
We are almost there but not quite. Justin Bieber famously got his start on YouTube, which is a step up from A&R scouts haunting the clubs -- he was 14 and in Canada so probably would never have been found. But a label signed him and increased his exposure by several orders of magnitude. That wasn't even 15 years ago.
Moving from the opposite direction is live music revenues -- from the late 1980s The Grateful Dead made most of their money from touring, not albums, and were one of the top grossing acts for a few years despite a paucity of hit records (a phenomenon the music and financial press seemed to find incomprehensible). Like Bieber, they needed the labels to get there, but then again they started about 60 years ago. They were also pretty into investigating new technology and models despite playing somewhat "low tech" music.
And some breakout stars now control their own finances and corpus, which is also new and really of the same vintage as the Bieber example. I think Ke$ha was a pioneer in this regard, but she built on a prior precedent of some label-developed megastars (e.g. Bowie, Beatles, and famously Prince) who managed to get to the point where the labels needed them more than they needed the labels. Ke$sha pulled it off before getting to that point and she's not the only one (interestingly the only ones I've heard of doing this are all women, but it's not like I follow the music business).
The phase change I'm waiting for is when someone can really break out on their own without a Svengali like the labels. The influencer "infrastructure", such as it is, is too tenuous to pull this off today. But like you, I don't think it's far away, though next couple of years seems too soon. But within the decade.
The fascinating thing about this is the whole debate about how fair the streaming payments are will go away. Instead the stars will likely prefer that the music not be paid for at all (that will magically increase its frequency in the mix); instead it will function as a kind of free advertising for alternative revenue streams. In this, the example of the Dead is illustrative.
They're not all middlemen trying to take a cut out of artists. Those exist, and artists have always railed against the model... and then start their own label.
Labels are mainly a house for all of the logistics behind an artist. No artist wants to spend 90% of their time marketing, merchandizing, booking, etc, etc, etc. They want to create and perform. The label is supposed to enable that. As long as the label does so, then it's worth it. Plus it's a great way to work with your less musical friends. Corporate isn't the only option.
Not everybody needs to be the next Lizzo or else its abject failure.
It's a nice theory, but it doesn't really play out like that. For example, back in the 90s and 00s, indie record labels were all the rage, particularly in the metal world. You had all of these companies like Relapse, Metal Blade and Century Media operating "outside" of the major label system, and you'd think that would protect the artists from middlemen, but it didn't. Those companies absorbed massive amounts of money with relatively small staffs, and much to the detriment of the artists who would often go home with nothing after a tour. I watched it happen so many times that it became pointless to keep count. And don't even get me started on how little they actually supported the artists in any capacity -- they wouldn't even send singles to radio stations when the stations themselves were asking in order to put them into rotation.
There are certainly "good" independent labels, as well as good people working at "bad" major labels. I think almost everyone gets into the business because they love music and want to participate in finding and producing the best talent. However, much like every industry, once the revenue reaches some threshold and the employee counts grow, those altruistic motivations become much more difficult to maintain. Unless the person at the top of the company is wholly dedicated to music and that attitude is able to trickle down to every employee, then labels have a proven tendency to devolve into middlemanning and nickle/diming and worse.
> Labels are mainly a house for all of the logistics behind an artist. No artist wants to spend 90% of their time marketing, merchandizing, booking, etc, etc, etc. They want to create and perform. The label is supposed to enable that. As long as the label does so, then it's worth it.
That's an oversimplification and the last bit is definitely not true. A label is not actually a manager or booking agent or publicist. Labels pay people to do all of those things, in the same way that any musician can. In fact, the biggest function that an indie label provides these days beyond some physical distribution (which is also a third party service), is maintain a list of those managers and booking agents who may be willing to take a meeting with a no-name startup band just because the label vouches for them. That's about it.
More importantly, managers and booking agents still aren't going to do all of the work for you. One of the biggest shocks that bands face when getting signed, is just how much of the business and marketing work they need to do themselves. So at the end of the day, anyone is more than welcome to give away 80% of their gross to a label if they want, but they have to do so understanding that more than 50% of the effort is still going to fall on the band members' shoulders.
> That's about it.
Speaking of oversimplifying… That comparison is like saying a friendship is just a temporary association of two chunks of matter. Technically accurate from one slice, but boy is that missing information and not descriptive of the entire context.
It sounds like you had some negative experiences. I have too. It’s important not to let them colour your future. Damn them. They are not the whole of possibility. Humans aren’t all scum for the existence of thieves, after all. There’s more out there.
YouTube is a precursor to TikTok and for the most part offers the same functionality (organizing and distributing media to billions of people). YouTube has existed for 17 years and is not lacking in uploads by talented musicians, singers, and bands. Since the two companies are not that different and both serve billions of people, there's already 17 years of proof against your argument. Also, Justin Bieber would not exist without the record labels. He very likely would have faded out of the consciousness of the masses a few years after his e-fame.
>The music industry is growing because independent musicians are finally figuring out how to navigate it without any need for those traditional industry services.
Uploading music to YouTube or TikTok is not "navigating" the industry. As easy as it is to upload content, it's just as easy to be forgotten. There's countless other people competing for eyeballs on those platforms.
The record labels provide administrative resources, recording/audio engineering, distribution/merchandise, legal, booking/touring, management, public relations, industry contacts, and probably more. Tackling that workload (if popular) without outside support does not seem possible.
Also, the record labels exist to serve the masses. They always have, and always will. I don't see a huge demand for the style of music independent artists create. If there was such a demand, the record labels would capture it. They exist to make a profit, and aren't dumb. They don't hold the little guy back, it's the little guy who doesn't understand they are competing in a (wrong) market that isn't interested in their product.
I grew up hating the RIAA. I used to spend time reading articles about how awful the RIAA was as a budding musician. Now that I'm older, I'm sad to see what they represent disappear. They were the foundation that the pinnacle of American culture was built off of in the 60s-90s. Their gate offered quality at the cost of quantity. What's happening now, IMO, is that the market is dividing more and more every year. More bands that fulfill the needs of fewer people. This trend is not sustainable in the long run, especially for the musicians.
Social platforms and digitalization can helped being truly independent but there's still non-music work that a label would do for you that you now have to manage.
And even if the stories about the struggling musicians becoming rock stars has always been embellished, it seems nowadays most of the current ones had financial security before pursuing their music career because of the low budgets available to develop new artists.
True, but the only OmarRodriguezLopez (for example) that I actually listen to is available on Apple Music. Every once in a while I'll pull up something on YouTube that isn't on Apple Music, but my 99% of the time music player is Apple Music, and if I buy something that's not on there it is a PITA to deal with and costs as much as a month sub to all the things on streaming.
The only reason that a label like Sargent House is relevant is as a discovery aid.
Except that is rapidly becoming untrue, which is the entire point. Self-management in the music industry is actually quite simple if you have the tools and knowledge, and both of those are now widely available to everyone.
You’re not wrong, people can do more themselves now…but the labels can also do these things, while being globally networked. You sound like you know what you’re talking about, but probably worth spending more time knowing your enemy if you really want to destroy them.
Not to mention the general buggyness that's on iOS Music. I feel like maybe it's just me because people generally enjoy it, but the app is a pretty terrible experience overall (Slow, buggy, messy). It sometimes refuses to play a song! Maybe I'm just getting old.
I'm on a family plan where the cost per person is negligible, so I can deal with it most of the time, but I do sometimes miss the ipod days.
I use streaming services for taste testing, but if I really like something and want to own it, I turn to a DRM-free platform (e.g. Bandcamp) to buy from the artists, then use my own solution for playing that music on my devices (in my case Navidrome).
And as a bonus you'll put a lot more money in the pockets of the artists you love.
My favorite way to support artists I love is to go to their tours and buy their merch, including vinyls that are too cumbersome to actually listen to :D.
I wonder if another app might solve your issues? Certainly my combo of Navidrome + substreamer (on Android) doesn't have any of those issues. My music is tagged and has embedded artwork and the app just uses what's there. Then I just use MusicBrainz Picard to ensure my tags are clean and in good shape.
> My favorite way to support artists I love is to go to their tours and buy their merch, including vinyls that are too cumbersome to actually listen to :D.
This is the way!
I use that with Apple Music.
It’s still only $25 per year.
All my obscure old hip hop cds nicely looked after by Apple and available to stream or download anywhere.
Where are you seeing this happen? The only thing I ever notice is album covers swapping out. In the 6 years I've been a spotify customer, I can only ever recall 2-3 songs becoming unavailable.
I also grab mp3's using ymusic and a hacked pandora app on my phone. I miss the days of what, waffle, and oink though. Still haven't gotten into orpheus yet.
Also op above is right, bandcamp is awesome.
There are sites like bandcamp, boomkat, beatport, bleep, 7digital, but they all have smaller collections, so may not have what you're looking for.
There's also budget options of questionable legality hosted in countries with a more flexible approach to music licensing, like e.g. mp3va.com.
For an up and coming musician (e.g. Billie Eilish in December 2015, after it was clear she had potential and after she had signed with an A&R in January 2016, but well before she signed with Interscope Records in August 2016),
What is the primary motivation to sign to a record label?
Assuming they have a solid understanding of the financial and copyright aspects of the transaction (which I'm sure Eilish had through her brother/producer, who had worked in the industry for years), what are the primary factors that influence the decision?
The ones that occur to me are marketing/PR/general exposure, access to artistic collaborators (visual, musical, etc.), and in the case of "advances" on future albums, an insurance/put option against the unpredictability of their future career.
But I have never worked in the industry, so I'm seeking wisdom from the HN crowd!
There are a lot of resources in the industry that are not available to the public. You have to build those connections over years, in some cases decades.
When promoters are doing things like trying to pay you in stolen blue jeans (love you, T.O.) it can help to have more people in your corner.
The music industry is segmented, and man some parts are the Wild West. Total fun, but you will struggle to make enough for cab fare at times without support.
There are some segments of the music industry that are specialized, and capital-intensive or labor-intensive (merchandising, physical distribution, producing/mixing/mastering, studio access).
The specialized segments would presumably not be able to exist or sustainably operate without a steady/predictable source of cash flow.
The big labels are market makers, connecting talent to these specialized services, and taking a cut off the top of every D2C transaction, in the form of a special variety of IP-licensing.
This results in a bimodal distribution of musician outcomes. If you're accepted by a big label, you fit into modality B, which is shifted far to the right. If you're indie, you fit into modality A, which is shifted fart to the left.
If you stick it out in A, you keep a higher percentage of lower expected earnings. If you shift into B, you keep a lower percentage of higher expected earnings, and gain difficult-to-price assets in the shapes of fame, connections, and responsibilities.
If this abstraction holds, it's kind of analogous to the differences between an indie hacker and a VC-funded startup founder? cool food for thought.
I like to think more dimension to that scale is possible, but unexplored. That’s what I’m working on figuring out myself.
The degree to which you end up in B can differ a lot and depends on the nature of your agreements with whoever you get involved with and that can vary in a big way. We’ve all heard the stories of artists getting screwed out of their publishing rights even if they retain performing rights and all that.
The music world seems less rigid to me, expectations are different. And personalities are very different. Maybe the software/tech crossover in electronic music is closer, but I have no experience there. I’m a relic. :)
Another important thing to remember is that many musicians aren’t really dedicated/focused/organized/disciplined (pick as many as you’d like) enough to run Band, Inc. Plenty of bands also have no interest in becoming a brand and are willing to stay a bit more underground if it means they can focus on music. Labels and others who are interested in handling that work can be great partners.
Basically it seems like it's easier than ever to become a musician with global reach/fans but harder than ever to make a decent living off of it.
https://www.nodepression.com/the-wrong-haul-neil-joni-have-y...
However, the problem with that is, if I don't listen to Taylor Swift at all, why is a portion of my subscription fee going to her? If, say, $10 per month of the money I give to Spotify goes to artists, it should just go to who I listen to. If I listen exclusively to Obscure Band X, then all of my money should go to them. If half my streams are Taylor Swift and half OBX, then they should both get $5.
Because Spotify needs to pay extra to have the right to stream Taylor Swift, or Dua Lipa, not OBX.
> If I listen exclusively to Obscure Band X, then all of my money should go to them
Well, that's the thing, some of your money will always go to Taylor Swift or whatever label she is on, regardless of whether you're listening Taylor Swift or not.
As an musician myself I'm NOT on Spotify and actively prevent my music to be on that platform. "Exposure" is meaningless. I make 1000 times more money slapping ads on my music on Youtube than these streaming services.
As far as I can tell, the big goal for the folks who were 25 in 1978 was to get an album on with large distribution and make basically mailbox money for the rest of a career. I've known people who have done that basically on a couple songs. Like, pretty middle of the road folks I've met were able to make a living off their mailbox.
That will likely never happen again in our lifetimes.
But it's just not the case that folks were never making a living off selling recordings.
And further, being in a world market (as far as I can tell for a small, small time artist) is horrible:
I'm a very, very good musician but I am not world-class good.
But now I have to compete with world-class artists?
I'd much rather have to book shows via telephone if it means that I had access to a local scene that didn't have access to literally every recording ever made.
As a listener I personally like that access, but as a musician I have no problem thinking it's categorically =not= better for folks on the small end of things.
Also doesn't sound like that old system actually was good for the music industry, it made a few lucky people a lot of money even if they didn't produce good music, which encourages people to chase those contracts and optimize for that rather than pleasing music listeners.
These folks aren't terrible, but they aren't, like Queen or Michael Jackson.
There are a couple of directions that my disagreements run, but of them would be something like this:
there's no middle ground where people can make a modest living playing music anymore. There were several ways to do that, prior to the mid 90s.
That was good for the industry in that instead of only allowing amatures or world-class acts to be performing, you had a ton of folks kind of not being great.
But the only way you get to be really, really good at this is by doing it all the time.
So now, instead of having a bunch of folks who were kind of making it, you mostly have either destitute folks or hobbyists.
So I don't agree that having a bunch of middling musicians didn't produce good music: where do we think all those really talented, experienced folks come from? People aren't born knowing how to arrange a tune or work an audience.
> Sounds like they won the lottery by getting perpetual visibility on poorly made albums thanks to how poorly optimized discovery and publishing was back then. Wont ever happen again with how much better those processes are today.
first: better for whom? optimized for what, in particular? Spotify is better optimized for funnelling the money that artists earn towards Joe Rogan than any other system in human history. but that's not an absolute good; that's optimization for a particular purpose.
second, it's wrong because the lottery those folks won was not a discovery or publishing lottery. I'm not even sure how (or why) you think the publishing side of the music industry is any different than it was in 1978; maybe you're not using "publishing" the way the industry uses it. but discovery wasn't a problem back when it was incredibly expensive to record music in the first place. that change has nothing to do with Spotify or streaming or anything like that; it happened because digital recording technology (mostly) replaced analog recording technology, and each type of recording tech got commoditized, i.e., smaller and cheaper. that had to happen for a discovery problem to even exist; in 1978, recording studios were almost industrial machinery.
I guess that's just two types of wrong, maybe three depending on what you're trying to say with the word "publishing" there.
on the bright side, this is legit:
> doesn't sound like that old system actually was good for the music industry
that's pretty true. but you can say about it about the modern equivalent also.
sorry, this is false; there was a big chunk of the 20th century were selling recordings was very lucrative.
even today, there are still a few people both big and small making money that way.
I read this all the time, and I don't dispute it's true. But I also don't understand the math. Spotify claims to have paid out $7 billion to artists this year. Let's assume that only a quarter of that went to North America, which is the approximate proportion of the North American Spotify market vis a vis the world.[0] So that's $1.75 billion. In the year 2000, which was the top year for CDs, 985 million CDs were moved.[1] Artists would get paid like $1.50 per CD. [2] That was $1.48 billion. Accounting for inflation that comes to $2.43 billion.[3] OK, $2.43 billion > $1.75 billion, so bang, artists made more in the before times. Except, Spotify is just one service. Amazon, iTunes, Tidal, YouTube, Deezer, Pandora, etc. are also paying artists. I don't have the numbers for all those services, but collectively they comprise 2/3 of the streaming market. Assuming their payouts are comparable to Spotify's, the total annual North American streaming payout isn't $1.75 billion but $5.25 billion. And $5.25 billion is a lot more than $2.43 billion.
All of these numbers are very back-of-the-envelope, but even so, I'm not seeing why the artists are getting a bad deal in comparison to the way it was before. Certainly the argument can be made that objectively they were getting an extremely crappy deal before, and now it's graduated to "merely" crappy. But just on the numbers, I'm confused how it can amount to far less money, especially as the payouts keep growing.
I have a couple of hypotheses as to why it might seem worse. (TLDR is that the artists who benefit from the Spotify arrangement aren't talking, but the ones suffering are.)
First of all, popular musicians over time tend to peak at some point and then make less money, simply because their time in the sun has passed. The overwhelming majority of artists with lucrative careers in 2000 don't have lucrative careers now. They got less popular but also coincidentally streaming happened. Might as well blame streaming. Meanwhile, the artists popular in 2022 were in grade school or younger in 2000 are making vastly more money now than they were then, simply because they weren't in the industry yet. Mega-stars like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo weren't even born. They're silent about those days because they didn't experience them. But a fair accounting has to take the Spotify winners into account, not just the people who are suffering now.
Second, I think that a lot of streaming dollars are going toward that long tail, in rather negligible amounts individually but amounting to a good sum collectively. Assume the top tier musicians in the streaming era are losing out compared to their potential income in a physical media dominated regime. But, meanwhile there are tens of thousands of older artists who have weird, obscure tracks that nobody would physically buy on a whim -- and probably wouldn't even be in stock in a physical store -- but their tracks end up getting played occasionally on streaming for a variety of reasons: They were excerpted in a film, TV show, article, or other song, which causes people to look them up, their title or lyrics cause them to pop up on keyword searches, they end up on a shared playlist, etc. Here's a concrete example. I like the Dua Lipa song "Love Again," the one that that has the chorus with the Darth Vader theme done in old-timey style. Except, it turns out it's not the Imperial March at all. It's a sample from an actual old-timey 1932 song, "My Woman." [4] When I found this out, I added this 90 year old song to my playlist, and probably played it a dozen times. That meant the current rights holders got paid about $3.50 on my account. But there's no way I would've paid for a CD, so they would've made zero off me without streaming. Multiply that same story by many others. How many? In my case, Last.fm says I listened to about 6300 new tracks in 2021. In the physical media era I would've had to buy a CD every single day to equal that. In my peak purchasing heyday, probably around 2000, I only bought approximately one CD a week, a lot more than average, but even so that only comes to about 1000 tracks a year. So thanks to streaming services, I helped 5300 more tracks generate revenue that otherwise would not have done. Or to put it another way, Last.fm says I listened to about 3000 different artists (~1500 artists for the first time) who all got paid some small amount, whereas in the time of CDs all that money would've been spent on the few (40-50) artists who I liked well enough to buy a whole CD/CD-single. The losers are the popular newer artists who were deprived of my CD royalties, but of the winners, many are dead or no longer in the industry, so their positive perspectives aren't being heard.
[0] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/spotify-statistics/#Spot...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/186772/album-shipments-i...
[2] https://www.indiemusicacademy.com/blog/music-royalties-expla...
[3] https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2000?amount=148
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Again_(Dua_Lipa_song)
Many bands use to love their labels privately but in the press blast the labels as evil corporate empty suits to fit that typical narrative and image.
Podcast, youtube channel, music, it is all the same process and payout structure.
Since there is too much choice you just have to sample what is popular and so what is popular gets more popular at the expense of the less popular. Repeat.
If you look at the RIAA's revenue figures over time:
https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/
The story they sure seem to tell is that revenues in the music markets over the last 40-50 years are driven as much (or more) by favorable macroeconomic trends than any particular format.
Hence the huge rise in CD sales in the irrational exuberance of the 90s. Was there anything about CDs in particular? Maybe the quality got people to pay more and boost revenues, but that probably wouldn't have happened w/o increased disposable income. CDs prominent heights in that chart are as much a function of when they were introduced (during boom time) as much as anything else. They didn't "drive" revenues themselves.
Streaming is probably pretty similar. There's some particular features: streaming increases convenience when it comes to management/access and dramatically slashes the consumer cost (and artist revenue). But I'm not going to bet it's driving revenue over macroeconomic trends. In fact, I'd be willing to bet it has actually hobbled revenue at some level, since it cannibalized digital retail that was growing pretty handily even during the last recession and piracy options.
Guess we'll need a recession like 2007 to find out. Streaming might be stickier than other formats since cost is capped, but I wouldn't rule out that paid subscriptions suffer.
I don't really want to, but I listen to a variety of music, but a lot of sleep sounds & ambient music, and I keep that on Youtube. I listen to everything else on Apple Music, otherwise all my recommendations become Ambient heavy. My "ambient" moods and my "anything else" moods don't really overlap.
But looking at year to year dollar growth at 8-10% inflation is not accurate. This headline is probably only an 8-10% grow rate in real terms.
"Asia grew by 16.1%, with its largest market, Japan, seeing growth of 9.3%. Excluding Japan the region experienced a 24.6% climb in revenues. "
I wonder why the big difference.
That's usually a big part of revenues. From what I've seen by watching recording performances, there have been many places throughout the US to perform live in that time. Varied state-by-state even.
No one demands a purity of purpose from software developers.
This is the equivalent of saying only the wealthy can make art. As it’s been for most of history. (Brief periods when patronage existed aside.)
Okay, fine, I suppose I should actually respond.
The problem with this view is that truly high quality art requires time and attention that few can afford without some level of compensation.
If we lived in a non-capitalist society where people didn't have to work to survive, I might agree with you. Heck, even a basic income could make a life as an artist possible.
But that world doesn't exist.
So your idea would do one thing and one thing only: it would relegate the creation of art to the domain of the wealthy. And that is not a world I'd want to live in.