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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

The reality is that yes, cassettes really were responsible for a substantial downturn in music revenue in the late 70s and early 80s:

https://i.insider.com/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000

Then cassettes got replaced with CDs which (initially) were read only, which again saved the market from piracy ... until online piracy with Napster and MP3 players completely crushed the music market, but far worse than cassettes.

Even 20 years later, the market still hasn't recovered to the level of peak CD revenue, despite the global economy growing substantially:

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/...

Piracy may since have receded, but only due to Spotify / Apple Music dumping pricing.

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That graph does not show cassettes were responsible for that, it just shows revenue numbers. There are other possible causes.

As someone who lived through part of that (I’m from ‘78 but for a country that was lagging in media developments; we got CDs in the early 90s) I can say that cassettes were a lousy medium. I love them because I grew up with my Walkman and I loved the tape swapping scene (physically compiled and traded playlists, for those young enough to not have participated), but objectively they sucked. Even the best tapes eventually had hiss if you played them enough times. Yet they were not sold at a significantly lower price to compensate this. I mean vinyl decays too but a good pressing handled with care will outlive you (for real, I’ve got plenty of great-sounding LPs from my grandma, and she’s been dead for 8 years), but after paying a high price for a cassette only to have it sound like crap after not that much time, you wouldn’t fall for that trap too often. You’d make a copy right after buying, and then share more copies with others too.

You say that cassettes were responsible for that drop in revenue and I disagree (though of course respect your opinion), but I say the climb once CDs came in could also be interpreted as people willing to buy music just fine provided it sounded good and kept sounding good. I mean it’s not like cassettes went away as a piracy medium once CDs came in, yet revenue climbed anyway.

> That graph does not show cassettes were responsible for that, it just shows revenue numbers. There are other possible causes.

You don't mention any of these possible causes though.

> interpreted as people willing to buy music just fine provided it sounded good and kept sounding good

Yes, CDs replaced cassettes and records. They had better audio quality and were nearly as small as cassettes. But cassettes weren't much worse overall than records. The audio quality wasn't as good as vinyl (though that came mostly from cheaper tapes, good tapes has fairly competitive audio) and aged more quickly, but they were much smaller, which was a big advantage. So overall, cassette piracy was competitive with vinyl sales, but not with CD sales.

> You don't mention any of these possible causes though. I did not, but I was responding to your "The reality is that yes, cassettes really were responsible" which to me reads like a statement of fact and not one of possible cause. The fact remains that the graph you shared does not proof cassettes were responsible for that.

Another possibility is that music revenue around that 1976 peak shown in your graph is due to wider reasons (e.g., '74 and '75 had negative GDP growth, then positive for a few years, then negative in '80 and '82 with a positive '81, that actually matches the revenue graph to some extent, so I don't think it's an established fact that cassettes were the cause for this.

As a disclaimer though, I'll admit my opinion is tainted by the fact that the record companies were pushing that 'cassettes are killing music' agenda, which I disagree with, so I'm certainly biased in my views.

> I did not, but I was responding to your "The reality is that yes, cassettes really were responsible" which to me reads like a statement of fact and not one of possible cause. The fact remains that the graph you shared does not proof cassettes were responsible for that.

It's an inference to the best explanation: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ No empirical evidence conclusively proves its true explanation, but the best available explanation is the most likely correct one.

> Another possibility is that music revenue around that 1976 peak shown in your graph is due to wider reasons (e.g., '74 and '75 had negative GDP growth, then positive for a few years, then negative in '80 and '82 with a positive '81, that actually matches the revenue graph to some extent, so I don't think it's an established fact that cassettes were the cause for this.

But that seems a much less likely explanation. The GDP remained pretty steady during that time:

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-...

Nothing there is indicating that the music market would suddenly contract by 30%.

> It's an inference to the best explanation: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ No empirical evidence conclusively proves its true explanation, but the best available explanation is the most likely correct one.

This is gibberish, dude. If we don't know, let's admit we don't know. "the best available explanation is the most likely correct one" is not even close to reality.

> This is gibberish, dude. If we don't know, let's admit we don't know. "the best available explanation is the most likely correct one" is not even close to reality.

By this standard you don't know anything, since you can never rule out (bad) alternative explanations with certainty.

> It's an inference to the best explanation

You've not provided that explanation. You're telling us it's the best explanation but you haven't explained it or given any argument for why it's the best -- other than because it's what you've said is the best.

If you have a better explanation, why you don't just provide it to us? That's like saying to a scientist: I don't believe your explanation is the best we have, but won't provide a better one myself. Very easy.

That’s not how it works though, a scientist needs supporting evidence for their explanation before the null hypothesis can be ruled out. You seem to have your mind set on an explanation while other people aren’t seeing the evidence you’re seeing to support it.

>> It's an inference to the best explanation: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ No empirical evidence conclusively proves its true explanation, but the best available explanation is the most likely correct one.

I don’t think that link implies what you think it does.

It discusses abduction as a way to justify a hypothesis, you still need to test it. I’m not arguing your hypothesis is wrong, I’m just arguing I think you’re wrong in treating it as a fact (“the reality is yes …”). You could have said “the reality is cassettes could have … “ and that would be true.

As someone in college in the late 70s we did a ton of taping each others’ vinyl onto cassette and pretty no one I knew actually bought prerecorded cassettes unless that was the only medium available.

Of course, as with software, not every cassette copy represented a lost vinyl album sale but copying in places like colleges was very widespread.

> You don't mention any of these possible causes though.

What about

* The rise of blockbusters. Jaws was the first in 1975. Domestic office boomed https://i.redd.it/7nmrszljbdda1.png

* The rise of home gaming and computing. The second generation of gaming consoles is right around this time: Fairchild Channel F (1976), Atari 2600 (1977), Odyssey (1978)... In 1977 you had the Apple II, TRS-80, and the Commodore PET.

* VHS got introduced in 1977.

If we posit there are only so many dollars any one person is willing to spend on entertainment, perhaps it's not a stretch to think these have contributed to less dollars being spent on music?

> That graph does not show cassettes were responsible for that, it just shows revenue numbers. There are other possible causes.

You don't mention any of these possible causes though.

what?

if you put forward a graph and someone else points out that the graph doesn't show what you say it shows, the person has identified that the graph is not relevant to the discussion.

they don't now have the job of explaining the graph. the graph is not relevant. it just leaves the conversation.

Think probably the most important quality was you could use a cassette or CD in a portable player, boom box, or car stereo.

In the 1980s there was a record store where I lived that sold "used" records and tapes. Their hook was that they'd take any record back within a week of purchase. I think they witheld a dollar or two on the refund.

So you'd go in, buy a record and a blank cassette, go home and make a tape of the record, then return the record. My friends and I did this countless times. If there was a record we all liked we'd just buy more tapes and make a copy for each of us.

If this was a common thing in other towns, I can see why it reduced revenue. Even if this exact model was unusual, you could still borrow records from friends and make tape copies, so only one of you had to buy the record.

Making copies of cassettes was just standard practice. A new album came out and we’d all chip in for one and then copy the rest onto cassettes using the double speed cassette copying that was standard in most stereos.

The hole in revenue in the early 2000 was because pirating was the only real option to get music online, you had no other choice.

The music industry was too stubborn to consider selling online and preferred to keep selling CDs, they were very very late to adapt and lost some revenue because of that.

By doing that, they also ensured that consumers went to great lengths to produce good-quality rips of their full catalogs, effectively establishing large libraries of content ready to be distributed for free. Thanks to reasonable streaming prices, my children will likely never have to know what a bitrate is, whereas I was forced to develop a full range of "pirate skills".

> Thanks to reasonable streaming prices

What you view as reasonable is so low that musicians hardly make any money from it.

That's somewhat ridiculous if that is the reality. All of CD manufacturing, shipping, retail overhead is eliminated in streaming. In reality streaming should produce more money for talent, eliminate overhead, and put more pressure on recording companies profit margins.

The height of the CD was ludicrous. A CD cost 15-20$ in the mid nineties, and cassettes, a more expensive and complicated medium, were half of that.

So a lot of the collapse isn't EVIL PIRATES, it is that the industry was sitting on a massive monopoly and cash printing machine, and digital collapsed that profit margin.

Music production used to require million dollar+ recording studios that the labels had a semi-monopoly on. Even in the 1990s, you could get usable recording equipment and software from a PC and Microsoft Windows.

Radio payola is mostly the last gasp of label control, although that seems to be going strong.

The REAL killer of music revenue is the rise of video games and way more television/video accessibility. First of all, there isn't one TV in the home like it was up to the 1990s. TVs are cheap, and smartphones are ubiquitous. Video games. tiktoks/youtubes, and TV dominate the media of the youth, and music is a peripheral/decorative aspect of those.

Essentially music filled the world of bored teenagers once upon a time, but boredom has been destroyed in the modern world (replaced with media saturation ennui).

> Essentially music filled the world of bored teenagers once upon a time, but boredom has been destroyed in the modern world (replaced with media saturation ennui).

Interessanting hypothesis. Do people listen to music less nowadays? It seems indeed not as dominant as in the 90s, I admit that.

If you're watching insta/tictok you're probably not also listening to music at the same time. Also kids these days listen to a much wider range of music then I was ever subjected to. We got whatever local radio stations could be picked up, or if your family had a collection and let you touch it. Now my daughter can pretty much pull up anything made on YouTube and play it from classic instrumental to whatever was released yesterday.

Everyone on spotify is free to put their music on bandcamp for $10 instead, and I in fact have bought music exactly that way, getting high quality lossless audio from a niche artist that probably doesn't make a cent from spotify.

But artists largely don't take their music off spotify to exclusively sell alone, because if they tried that they wouldn't make a dime. Music is hard to "find" and your average music maker trying to go their own way (I know several) makes you zero dollars, so why not put it on spotify, make ten bucks, and also possibly find a fan who will buy your music on bandcamp for full price and essentially pay for your life.

The modern creator economy has largely shown that the way you be an artist and make a living is by giving away your stuff mostly for free, making good quality stuff, gaining fans, and letting a small percentage of those fans literally donate you an $80k salary. This works for game makers, music makers, book writers, video producers, journalists, etc.

I doubt it works for almost anyone. Who is making $80k in donations? More likely seems the following: People listen to music on Spotify and don't even begin to think about donating any money to the musician. They already pay for Spotify after all. And of course Bandcamp can't compete with Spotify pricing, let alone piracy.

It's probably not going to be the model they go with, but I can imagine epic games doing 'giveaways' of music from bandcamp.

I think their current aim is to streamline licencing for video games, which would be smaller, but still real revenue.

Well, before spotify they made zero money from me and a lot of other people. Spotify also allowed a lot more people to publish their music. Increased supply and higher competition leads to lower prices.

1999 with its overpriced CDs is never coming back.

> Increased supply and higher competition leads to lower prices.

The "supply" of music, including music sold on CDs, is equally unlimited. What leads to the low Spotify price is that they have to compete with music piracy. CD prices weren't higher because CDs were expensive to manufacture and therefore limited in supply -- they weren't. Instead, they were more expensive because they didn't have to compete against piracy.

> they were more expensive because they didn't have to compete against piracy.

Bull. Any reasonably-sized town had at least one "dodgy" seller of pirated CDs.

CDs were expensive because they were fundamentally a vanity item, with sleeves and goodies. That empowered middlemen and official distribution chains which, in developed countries, is typically where profit accumulates. Artists themselves, under contract with labels, couldn't buy CDs at cost to sell at concerts - labels were pressured to protect the distribution chains.

CDs made middlemen rich, not artists.

You had more piracy during the CD era than anything you can imagine right now. Basically every town had a pirated CD shop, everybody knew somebody to call to get some pirated CDs, it was a full business.

Not in my country. Our police apparently prevented such shops.

Maybe you were in a police heavy country then. I remember pretty much everybody having a mix of pirated and real CDs at home.

By "increased supply" I meant - more artists were able to offer their music on the service. So each artist has a way bigger competition now. It was much harder to release a CD or get your songs on radio than get on spotify, bandcamp and youtube.

Yet many musicians could receive a living wage if just one executive gave up their corporate jet. Enough about that though... let's chide the 'entitled' consumer and supply and demand!

> The hole in revenue in the early 2000 was because pirating was the only real option to get music online

The Telecommunications Act of 1996, allowing the likes of Clear Channel/iHeartRadio to take over all the stations, shows to be the real culprit.

At the time we joked, due to the steep decline in radio variety, that CD sales would crater because people would only get to know a small handful of artists, leaving few CDs to buy, and the numbers here confirm it was more than just a joke.

> The hole in revenue in the early 2000 was because pirating was the only real option to get music online, you had no other choice.

You had absolutely the choice to buy CDs and not pirate anything from the Web. And the "hole" never nearly got filled with legal online services anyway even when they existed. 1999 CD sales are still the peak of music revenue.

Piracy is a service problem. Back in the early 2000s pirates simply offered a better service. The gaming industry understood that and quickly created online marketplaces for games. The music industry didn't - and instead of creating Spotify a decade earlier - spent the 2000s trying to sue grandmas who filmed their kids dancing to copyrighted music.

> Piracy is a service problem.

Maybe for two short years until iTunes came out. Then there was no service problem anymore. But CD sales kept collapsing while digital sales were hardly worth noting. Which proves that people loved pirated music because it was free, not because they couldn't buy it.

> created online marketplaces for games. The music industry didn't - and instead of creating Spotify a decade earlier -

Spotify exists for quite a long while now and revenue still hasn't returned, despite the world economy growing substantially since then, which refutes your theory. Spotify is so cheap because of piracy.

iTunes was not available everywhere. It was officially available in Eastern Europe only around 2011/2012. And in many other countries even later. Around the same time as Spotify which was a lot better service.

Before that I could either buy ridiculously overpriced CDs or go to ThePirateBay which was available in my country from day one. So yeah - it absolutely was a service problem.

Soon after Spotify appeared I stopped pirating, because Spotify offered a much better service than piracy sites and brick & mortar stores for a reasonable price.

> Soon after Spotify appeared I stopped pirating, because Spotify offered a much better service than piracy sites and brick & mortar stores for a reasonable price.

The fact that revenue still hasn't returned to 1999 levels shows that the price is not "reasonable". They are forced to price it that low because otherwise people would just pirate the music. Many probably still do.

Alternatively, the 1999 levels weren't reasonable. Or the 1999 level isn't reasonably today because there's a LOT more entertainment alternatives vying for attention.

Napster launched in 1999, The Pirate Bay launched in 2003, Spotify only launched internationally in 2010 / 2011. There's been a decade without proper legal options to get music.

Buying CDs wasn't a reasonable choice anymore in the digital age, CDs were outdated and not fit in the age where people could buy portable mp3 players.

The music industry was beyond late, they were a full decade late to the party and paid the price for it.

It was the same for movies for even a longer time until Netflix caught up, personally I couldn't buy the movies or series I wanted at the time, it wasn't available anywhere.

> Napster launched in 1999, The Pirate Bay launched in 2003, Spotify only launched internationally in 2010 / 2011. There's been a decade without proper legal options to get music.

That's simply false, iTunes launched in 2001.

Yes I know, I specifically avoided to talk about it since it did not really meet the demand at the time. The catalog was too small and DRMs were not removable at the time (until 2009) so it was pretty much useless for an mp3 player. I still give it to iTunes, it was the only legal place to buy music for the longest time even if it was limited.

Also the Windows version and the music store only launched in 2003.

Steam DRM (video games) is also not removable. And iTunes music did work on iPods. The main issue was that most people filled their iPods with pirated music instead.

But Steam games do work straight away on your computer, iTunes DRM music did not work on your average mp3 player everybody had. It's not like you could do something about it, it just refused to play it, I know, I had one.

And if you're asking customers to pay money to get the legal music and then download a DRM removal software from some Russian website to be able to listen to it (that might existed at the time, I don't remember), well that's even more hassle than piracy.

Even Apple themselves noticed the problem but a little too late, by then Spotify was already starting to spread.

Even iPod owners filled their hard drives with pirated MP3s. And every smartphone can support any DRM music software just as much as every PC can support something like Steam. The admissable reasons for piracy have long ceased to exist, yet people still don't like to pay for music. The revenue is still not on 1999 levels. It should be much higher by now if piracy wasn't a possibility.

As much iPods were a commercial success, they were absolutely dwarfed more than 10 to 1 by the number of standard mp3 players and those could not read DRM music at all. Out of my whole high school, you only had maybe one or two guys with a real iPod and thousands of mp3 players. They were much cheaper to buy and even easier to use.

And not sure why you bring smartphones, by the time modern smartphones were popular in the 2010s, people were using Spotify already.

> The revenue is still not on 1999 levels. It should be much higher by now if piracy wasn't a possibility.

Music piracy is at its lowest now it has ever been since the 80s.

iTunes only launched in 2011/2012 in Eastern Europe and many other countries. Before that the only way to get music digitally was to download it from P2P networks.

And of course in 2012, Eastern Europeans started to pay for their music, right? No? Maybe they were pirating it because piracy is free.

A lot of them - me included -started to use Spotify, because it is cheap and convenient. It really converted lots of pirates to paying customers.

There simply was no legal option to buy music digitally before that. CDs were overpriced and inconvenient.

The late 70s and early 80s was the dawn of tape trading, punk rock, rap, metal, and disco. 90% of it was only available through tape trading (or runs of 200 singles) because everyone had been shut out of a stagnant industry that was resting on AOR, super-decadent and overproduced prog, and continuing to throw money at the people who made money in the 60s.

As the 80s started, the record companies caught on and adjusted by hiring new A&R and getting into the clubs again. Then MTV happened.

The sulfur mining industry never recovered from the drop in revenue after someone discovered a way to extract it on scale from low-quality coal. Poland had a massive drop in revenue despite being the one selling both products. Does it mean they should attach a coal burning license agreement prohibiting the extraction process to each container, or try to prosecute people selling filters?

Piracy was illegal long before cassettes or Napster were invented. Sulfur extraction was always legal, and for good reason.

So the laws were misguided. Why should someone be granted a monopoly on excluding others from using an idea (patent) or content (copyright)? To prop up a business model that cannot be sustained except if based on threats of violence?

I'm a little doubtful piracy is the main driving force there, until digital music became common.

They charged more for CDs, and they became cheaper to make than tapes, so naturally revenue went up.

Music videos, and a few super successful pop stars, greatly increased interest in pop music for a period, but that tapered off.

If you need a legend for the second chart, here it is:

physical music videos (yellow); CD singles (light orange); CD albums (dark orange); cassette singles (light blue); cassette albums (Carolina blue); vinyl LP/EPs (darker blue); download singles (purple); ringtone/ringbacks (periwinkle); download albums (dark purple); SoundExchange distributions (lime green); synchronization (light gray); free streaming (green); paid streaming subscriptions (dark green)

If anything cassettes served as a music discovery service before we had the ability to share links online. Pretty much everything I ever bought I discovered because someone borrowed me a tape or sent me one from abroad.

But they also lead to a substantial decrease in music revenue, as the chart shows.

What you think the chart shows.

Commercial music had it's zenith and it declined. Just like everything else it didn't grow for ever and just like everything else there are reasons why you don't want to yank the chain of your consumers and your producers too much. The fact that the two correlate timewise does not mean the one cause the other. In fact I think that the music industry missed an absolutely huge opportunity. By the time I had digitized my whole collection they had royally missed the boat, whereas if I didn't have to go through all that who knows how much money I would have spent on new music by now. I used to spend a lot of money on music, now I spend none and not a dime of that difference was due to piracy.

I have friends in the music industry and got invited to a meeting of BUMA/STEMRA regarding the potential of streaming and it was like watching dinosaurs discussing the price of swampland while in the background you could see a comet heading straight for the planet. I don't think I've ever seen such a disconnect between producers and consumers. Product market fit is not just good for new companies, it is also good for existing ones. Fail at that and you will fail.

That juncture was a very distinct divide in pop music. The peak is likely around the peak of disco (Staying Alive: 1977). The post-peak of disco was kind of barren until the 1980s / MTV scene starting things going again.

I think the collapse is due to the death of vinyl, which was probably associated with disco and older dying styles.

CDs could always be recorded to cassettes. It was just an audio stream you could feed to the cassette player. So pirates and swappers wouldn't have cared that much.

And the sales peak of cassettes is during the late 1980s. So that was well after the collapse of sales.

How do you see that in the chart?

This kinda explains the anti-piracy hysteria of the 2000s.

And their resurgence with AI and Google’s web integrity thing

The web is just TV3.0, reserved for acceptable political and commercial content now. Eh I’m done with that; switching off to all of it. Will stick to internet for job and not use it on my personal desktop, just phone.

Copyright rent seekers can do something useful for humanity or stick to making it about “the art” and perform local theatre

> not use [Internet] on my personal desktop, just phone.

Then you'll be headed in the exact wrong direction! Phones are generally locked down corporate platforms, where Google's current attempt to lock down the web got its inspiration and start (see: SafetyNet). Even if you do repave and install an OS that represents your interests, the input/output capabilities are by default limited and the available apps still generally revolve around accessing centralized services hosted elsewhere. Whereas with your personal desktop, you can keep it personal and install libre software that lets you escape the copyright cartel and big tech walled gardens.

You can’t opt of it, your friends will make decisions that affect you, bother you with political opinions, share your photos etc.

It’s a good thing my friends also hate the web. I was pretty much the lone holdout

“Opt out” from my references frame; I will use a gmail for government and services as expected, and do nothing else online but what my job asks. I’m done scrolling and collecting useless knowledge and anecdotes

I literally just switched to shit tier ISP speeds

Fortunately I deleted TwitFace a decade ago

Will be blacklisting HN, Reddit on the router end

Down to a stupid beefy ML machine through work, personal iPhone and old MacBook Air running Linux; feels good man dog

> Then cassettes got replaced with CDs which (initially) were read only, which again saved the market from piracy

CD players hit the market in the mid 80s (I got my first one in 1988). The effect of cassette tapes would have really hit in the late 70s and early 80s as high bias tapes hit the market. In the 90s, CD players became affordable. Also, there was a big price difference between a cassette and a CD. Cassette was about $8 for a new album, CD was $14.

How could the CD save the market from piracy?

With a simple cassette recorder with microphone or other audio input you could copy any CD.

You could copy the CD but the copy wasn't as good as the CD.

Everyone bought CDs when they got popular because:

- They sounded better

- They didn't wear out from playing them

- Small/Portable/Durable

- Easy to move between tracks

- No need to flip them to go to the other side (some cassette players eventually figured out how to do this without a flip)

If you have the choice between a cassette copy, to which people were already used to, and no copy, people would choose the cassette copy.

CDs made the source better because the sound was better than the sound of original cassettes.

I mean the top musicians are still millionaires so I don't feel too sorry for them

CDs used to be crazy expensive. They cost much more than what was reasonable. Today I have access to untold thousands of records for €10 per month. That money (non inflation adjusted) would have bought me only a single record back in the day.

One could argue that the current price of music is too low. But the price they tried to extract back then was completely unreasonable and I think those excesses contributed heavily to the current situation.

> But the price they tried to extract back then was completely unreasonable and I think those excesses contributed heavily to the current situation.

Yes that left incurable trauma. During late 90s to early 00s CD costed the same in Germany and in any post-communist country whose economies were in shambles. Something around 12 EUR which would be 18 EUR inflation adjusted now. I was wandering between shelves like a pariah and asking shop assistant like a beggar to insert the CD into the player so I could listen it in shop for few minutes. Music industry worked hard to make enemies for life.

Everyone pirated in the Eastern Europe back then. You bought a CD only if you were a big fan of the band. The rest was downloaded off the net. I've never bought a single CD in my life. Transitioned straight from pirating to Spotify.

Ha! the dial up internet was ruled by extortionist state monopoly and local ISPs were plagued with equipment thievery... the only way to acquire pirated music was physically exchanging hard drives with acquaintances.

That was true in the late 1990s, but by mid-2000s everyone could get fast internet with no data caps.

That's when Steam started taking off, but music industry was still stuck in the previous century.

They weren't, iTunes (and other services before that) existed before Steam. The music industry was ahead of the games industry, not the other way round. The difference is that video game DRM (Steam) succeeded, but music DRM didn't.

Steam was available in the Eastern Europe way before iTunes and Spotify. Music and movie industries really dropped the ball there.

In the US iTunes was available earlier, but people still liked piracy better.

iTunes was a DRM infested crap. Meanwhile pirates offered drm free files that you could play anywhere.

Steam is also "DRM infested" and non-free.

Steam is DRM-optional. Its DRM is easy to remove and lots of Steam games are DRM free. It also gained lots of popularity with its sales and bundles.

> CDs used to be crazy expensive. They cost much more than what was reasonable.

A market economy determines the value of goods by what people are willing to pay for it. Apparently, halfing the record price would not have doubled the sales, so the vinyl/CD price reflected the value of the music pretty well. But nowadays, legal music streaming has to compete against illegal piracy, which is free and only a little inconvenient, so the streaming price is forced to a very low level. Musicians can hardly make money from music sales anymore. If you make a type of music that isn't well suited for concerts, and you aren't massively popular, you are screwed.

That's true, but the music market is special in some ways.

* Artificial scarcity. Recorded music is a scarce good only because the law says so. You wouldn't download a car and so on.

* Non-fungibility. Music isn't all the same. Customers want a record with their favourite artist and not just any record of similar "quality".

There was a very limited time in human history where musicians could get rich by only selling recorded music. The norm otherwise has been that musicians earn money from live performances and now we're almost back to that. I'm not sure I think that's a bad thing.

> * Artificial scarcity. Recorded music is a scarce good only because the law says so. You wouldn't download a car and so on

But this scarcity is good. It enables, or would enable, production of music which wouldn't otherwise be produced. If music piracy weren't so much an issue today, the music industry size would probably be several times its current size (it would have simply grown with the rest of the economy, as it did ik the 90s) which would mean far more musicians could earn a living with their work. Especially musicians which make a type of music which isn't well suited for concerts. As a consequence, a lot of this music simply doesn't get made today. Yes, we instead got impossibly cheap Spotify (I don't think cheap flat rate streaming would have ever become a thing if it wasn't for piracy making actually selling tracks near impossible), but we also got less music, and consequently, less good music.

Compare this to the video game market, where piracy isn't as big of a problem as in music, due to much larger file sizes and better copy protection. Many of the great games we have couldn't have been made if video game piracy was significantly more common.

There are more than 100M tracks on Spotify. More that one person can listen to over several lifetimes. Even if 99% of them are crap - that still leaves 1M of good tracks. The amount of available music is simply staggering nowadays.

Yeah, but it would be even better if there was no piracy and thus significantly more money to be made in the music business.

It's not obvious that a larger market translates to higher quality supply. Certainly greater supply, but someone who's profit-motivated and is trying to capture more of the market would probably do better producing easy and diverse content in large quantities.

Yeah, it really was way too expensive. A single with one or two remixes or other songs did cost 5€. Linkin Parks Meteora did cost me 19€ and Reanimation 16.50€. Double CD samplers were around 25€ to 30€.

I'm happy with streaming but I'm also happy to buy a vinyl to additionally support my favourite artists, even when it costs 30-40€.

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