Music industry makes more each year | Hacker News Reader

Music industry makes more each year

grabstats.com

36 pointsetz17 comments

Anytime I see this kinds of numbers, the first thing I think about is - What about inflation?

Sadly, without proper information about what these numbers represent, and without accounting for inflation, there is no easy way to compare them.

I am sad to see you downvoted because you are right. Wikipedia says 1.4% for 2010 in the USA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inflation_...

I'd call quite significant and an important factor if you compare money over time.

I'm not sure, but is there anything to the fact that the people buying music experienced the same inflation?

I think this could be interpreted as missing the bigger picture. That is, that with all the upheaval in the business, the music industry is not hurting economically.

The overall economy is just as important as inflation. If the music industry outperforms other industries, even in a year-over-year decline, they can be seen as doing well.

In the area of music, digital technology introduces a lot of deflation in the costs of both production and distribution.

Over this period, how big is inflation relative to noise?

Well, as soon as you're talking about trends, you're implicitly disregarding/smoothing the noise. Over the long term, trends are what matters, and inflation is a pretty consistent, not entirely insignificant trend.

The important point (for me) is not how much money is being lost due to piracy, but whether the internet as it stands is destroying the music industry. Clearly it is not. The music industry, on the other hand, is currently bent on destroying the internet.

I think it is important to be wary of who piracy actually hurts though. I very strongly believe that piracy does hurt someone in the music industry, not the artist, but rather the major record labels.

I remember seeing stats 4 years ago that the income of a musician is actually going up pretty drastically because musicians are starting to go independent (book their own shows, record and release their own records, get their own shirts made to sell).

It takes a lot more work, and a lot of musicians just want to be in the music industry for the music, but they have to (and are starting to) accept that taking part in the business side of the industry will help put more food on their plates and give them nice places to live.

The major record labels will probably stay around for a long time thanks to highly commercial pop/rap artists, but it currently looks like they are attacking everything around them in a desperate attempt to keep all these artists going independent, and to keep the (relatively small) amount of revenue lost from piracy.

It is absolutely nuts that musicians used to get 5 cents for a record sale, and it is an absolute blessing that independent artists are getting most of the money from their record sales!

For purposes of what I posted I think it's good to consider artists who sell music via Topspin, Tunecore etc. as independent artists.

The clear implication being that there is really no loss from piracy. While this point could be argued, these numbers show nothing. First off, we don't know how much money would have been made had there been no piracy - that is, the music industry might have made even more money every year. The other issue is that while the music industry's worldwide revenues have increased, recorded music revenues have actually decreased, with North American revenues falling from $13 billion in 2007 to $12.6 billion in 2010, and worldwide revenues falling from $35.4 billion in 2009 to $35.1 billion in 2010. Of course, by that same note it can't simply be claimed that the loss is because of piracy. It may be that people are simply buying less music.

These stats don't start until 2006, which after the Napster revolution killed the CD store. I don't think these stats are useful for making any argument about the impact of piracy.

Exactly, piracy is the boogeyman they use to excuse any hit in their revenues. Since a downloaded song does not automatically equate to a lost sale there's no way to know how much of an impact it had. Plus the industry often ignores the long tail potential of a downloaded song, i.e., the person downloading the song likes the band they just found and goes to a show or buys merchandise. Of course, in that scenario the artist directly benefits and not the corporate members of the RIAA.

I would like to equate a dip in revenue to the bad PR the industry has gotten over the years by suing grandmothers for downloading songs, requiring purchasing songs multiple times because of multiple devices, making it difficult/illegal to copy purchased songs from one media to another, bribing politicians to create laws to their advantage over the consumer, so on so on. But I have no way to prove much like there's no way to prove piracy is killing their industry.

I'm willing to bet a dip in revenues could be attributed to the fact that we can legally stream music all we want either free or a small subscription fee through services such as Pandora or Spotify. I for one haven't felt the need to purchase music in years and I don't obtain music illegally.

Based on these kinds of reports though, the industry just seems to be doing fine to me. A dip in revenues from 13 billion to 12.6 billion is not a disaster. It's a statistical blip.

These losses started in 2008, during an economic downturn that we haven't fully recovered from. But I would have expected the losses to be much larger (than 3.1% in North American and 0.85% globally), especially for something that is entertainment / recreation.

So losses from people sharing music are important if they affect the ability, and desire of content producers.

I don't believe anyone disputes that. The debate is more likely about how you define those losses and who is actually to blame for them.

to me the numbers show that album sales are down because of an unbelievable change in the way that people buy music today as compared to 15 years ago. Buying a single song has replaced buying an album. The RIAA is claiming that album sales are down like 90 percent. DUH... but that's not due to piracy, it's due to itunes raking in 9 billion dollars for the music industry. If the itunes downloads were the 10 dollars or more that an album costs..... well you can do the math. So downloading may be killing the record labels, but it's the LEGITIMATE downloading of songs.

If you think about it, apple takes HALF of the price of a download, so that's 18 BILLION downloads last year alone.

I wonder if WP7 is going to help Microsoft in regards to this..

"US MP3 Player Retail Sales, by Brand, February 2007 (% market share)

Apple (73.7%), San Disk (9%), Creative (3.3%), Microsoft (2.3%), Samsung (2.2%), Other (9.5%)"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com