Current prices are an incredible bargain and only so because they don’t reflect the true value of the product.
Anything else is just trying to square the circle.
I grew up during the age of peak CD sales, and I still only bought like ten audio CDs in my life, all of them on the secondary market. I essentially didn't spend any money on music before Spotify came along. Now I spend 15 EUR every freaking month.
And it's not just piracy, although it is that, too. Before Spotify came along, I listened to music radio, and I also listened to a lot of free amateur music. And that was at a time when distribution was a challenge; now any artist can create a Bandcamp (or whatever) page in seconds and give away their work.
The entry barrier for making music is just incredibly low. I'm sure only gifted individuals can make exceptionally good music. But most music isn't exceptionally good and loads of people can make music that's good enough to have on in the background, i.e. what Spotify is being used for the vast majority of the time.
It was never that big, in absolute economic terms. I remember Slashdot was joking 20 years ago that one of the tech companies should just buy all of it to make the RIAA shut up. I guess it's unsurprising that organized culture has an outsized reach.
The studio album age of the 60s and 70s are the exception not the rule.
Ignoring 1994-2000, revenue is roughly inline with where it’s been the last 30 years.
And music companies (labels and publishers) are seeing record profits.
This is like an unprecedented golden age for the amateur musician. You can now record and distribute on your own and make some money off of it too. Music was never this easy to make, record, and distribute as it is today.
Market cap =/= revenue
And further: the numbers are only recorded music revenues, which excludes publishing, which accounts for another 20% error (or 40% of your base number).
So now we are at Fortune 100 for this arbitrary statistic.
More relevant is that music companies’ multiples are higher than ever. 9 figure ($100M+) sales for songwriter/artist catalogs aren’t common but we see several per year for older catalogs like Bob Dylan and newer ones like Bieber and Ryan Tedder (whom many have never even heard of, he’s a songwriter and lead singer of One Republic).
Over the past five years, there has been lot of investment flowing into music companies.
The 90's were an outlier IMO, because we got CD's for easy distribution but it was before the internet and especially smartphones were widely available.
Companies like Spotify and Netflix basically hinge on being more convenient than internet based piracy, radio, ad supported streaming etc.
Not just that, but it triggered a huge rebuy of old music for the format change from cassette. That's literally never going to happen again.
We have Spotify family subscription, always listening one of us' playlist at the dinner table and almost all of it created before 2000, and most before 1990. I'm talking about one 16yo, one 11 yo and two adults.
Recently, 16yo started his A levels here in London. The whole class created a playlist with their fav songs from all genres, 70+ teenagers. Hardly 10% of it is post 2000. Kids' family backgrounds are as diverse as it gets.
It is a matter of personal taste, curiosity and influence of people around you. There’s a lot of good music and good songs that were written in this century and in the last 10 years. However, this period of time is very small compared to the time passed since great classical music works were created. No wonder its share is small.
It's little surprise that your nuclear family listens to such a narrow range of music. Growing up, I didn't listen to new music in the house either. We had classical, old country, ragtime, and big band -- nothing newer than 30 years ago. My parents thought everything else was noise.
Oh, and funny thing, I've recently discovered artists from the 90s that I never heard of back then. Music discovery is, in my experience, in a golden era. There's not only a huge amount of new music, but as old music makes it online, it's making it to my ears.
What's the crisis? Your sample size is pathetically small, an appeal to the diversity of London (pfft, I scoff from the diversity of the urban centers of the Pacific Northwest) does nothing to reinforce your claim. Your bubble, my friend, is small. There is no crisis.
You claim that there is no Doechii, that Nicole Lizee is dead, that Lil Nas X never existed. And I cannot hear you.
You also have zero information about what might be pleasing to my ear. Listen to this while you’re cogitating your next blustering response, it’s better than Death Row: https://youtu.be/ukZYP5Dy43E?si=gV5Cljo8iIh86tLO
> there is simply no 21st century music to be had.
The appropriate response to "what is free jazz?" is "what isn't free jazz?" This is a joke, of course. Free jazz is crap; I like the old stuff. Same goes for prog rock. One cannot account for taste, after all.
Thanks for the Merzbow; I look forward to listening to it after the meeting I'm in. ;) But do note that Death Row is a record label, renowned for its production quality (wherein Dre would hire musicians to re-record backbeats that originated as lo-fi samples).
I must ask: do you look for new music? I do, daily, and I'm never unsatisfied. And, hell, I heard a sonata of Mozart just yesterday that I'd never heard before. So I'll say this: the back-catalog is so incredibly massive that one listener cannot hope to hear it all. It's much easier to be stuck in the past, than stuck in the present.
And I've been to several world metropolises, London included. A cohort of 70 high school students is a terribly small sample, whereever it may be situated. I didn't start really listening to music until my brother (a professional musician) departed for university.
edit: ah, hah. Merzbow is inspired by prog rock and free jazz. It's not bad; it's not my jam. Do your kids listen to it?
and this: https://youtu.be/NVjSycDJatc?si=9lIug-ay5ROvuNvt
and this: https://youtu.be/IYnuXnuaFNY?si=MGhr4dmfyfBQb0RU
You might dig these too, if you like those two: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI8w-h-HCAg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqnG_Ei35JE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BUzRO6J4gE The last one in particular by Joy Crookes isn’t from nowhere because it’s from South London, but it is weirdly from nowhen by being somehow contemporary with Amy Winehouse and Etta James. That’s what 21st century music is.
I read somewhere that the typical “classics” station whether it be RnB, Motown, Rock, etc has a playlist of 300 songs. There were many more songs produced during the covered era
Tipper Gore was up in arms about NWA (Dr. Dre is now considered a legend and Ice Cube is making family movies) and Ice T.
And even in the modern area as hip hop has become mainstream I remember people complaining that the pop charts had too many rappers.
People complained about Elvis and the Beatles when they were first coming out.
Do you think your parents wouldn’t say the same about the music you listened to growing up?
I know my parents thought the rap music I listened to were crap.
Ah, you mean the same four chords in succession: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I
What are you advocating for ? More expensive streaming subscription will mostly go music labels and top musicians who are multi millionaires some hundreds of millions Taking the money from parents of school kids and average 9-5 people
More precisely revenue has just caught up to the level it was 30 years ago
> A new threshold of minimum annual streams that a track must meet before it starts to generate royalties. The threshold, according to MBW, will de-monetize tracks that had previously received 0.5% of Spotify’s royalty pool.
https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-changing-how-pays-arti...
Anyway if the cutbacks only represent 0.5% of the total royalty pool, then they don't impact what's typically meant by the long tail, wherein the smaller back catalog items, in aggregate, end up being a substantial fraction of the total sales.
I vaguely recall that Taylor Swift took her music off Spotify over concerns for the small artists. Like doing it on behalf of them. I have my doubts about that being the reason, though...
Not if you adjust for inflation.
Not if you adjust for population growth.
Not if you adjust for growth in artists and music avaiable.
So in the end the money that goes to artists is worth maybe 10% of what it was in 1973, while serving a customer base that is 58% larger, probably much larger than that considering everybody has access now. And this money has to be split among many more artists than before, including many artists who have been dead for decades.
But regarding artists, you're sort of making my point: there are certainly more artists around that address essentially the whole world, as opposed to just themselves or their local area. Playing an instrument hasn't gotten easier (even that is arguable), but mastering music (at a mediocre level, maybe) has gotten easier, and distributing music has gotten way easier (presumably eventually that should affect the revenue split between labels and artists). And yes, all those artists of today are in competition with the artists of the past.
So there's certainly less money for each individual artist today, and there is more music available to me today, and I still don't have more time available to listen to much more of it.
But you do have a point regarding population growth.
Generally we have to adjust much more for inflation, as official inflation numbers are mostly fraudulent.
I agree with you on the cost of producing and distributing music going down, and I think it's fair to say that the creative part is easier and cheaper as well.
But don't people have more time to listen to music today when it is accessible everywhere?
> I grew up during the age of peak CD sales, and I still only bought like ten audio CDs in my life, all of them on the secondary market.
This is the kind of anecdote that tries to make an example that proves the argument, but it's so wildly different from the average music consumer in the 1990s that it's completely irrelevant.
You bought 10 CDs at a 2nd hand store in your entirely life and now you pay more for Spotify. But most people were buying 10, or 20, or 30, or more CDs a year, .... and now they're paying _less_ for Spotify.
So most people have a collection of 100 to 300 CDs? And if you include tapes and records, the average senior owns between 300 and 1500 albums?
This seems totally delusional, I think you are in a bubble.
Distribution costs are lower without, so any reduction in CD sales seem easily offset by digital sales, ads, etc.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/186772/album-shipments-i...
The best estimate for the number of adults that same year I could find was 191 million. Let’s say 200 million to include some teams.
That’s nowhere close to 10 to 20 CDs.
I can’t find a citation. But I’ve seen other places that people were spending $65 a year on music before streaming and iTunes
Which puts music purchases in the rough ballpark of streaming which is probably not coincidental.
Point is you’re looking at on the order of $100 per year plus or minus.
As a teenager in the 90s and a young man in the 00s, I barely bought a couple of original CDs in those decades. Most of the music I had was pirated (downloaded, or recorded from radio). I would fill my hard drive with 10s of GB of MP3s, then I'd cycle through it via Winamp. And I have no acquaintances with large music collections, unless that music was pirated.
Currently, I'm paying for a Spotify subscription AND a YouTube Premium subscription, which is way more than zero $.
Artists making money are those performing live, and filling auditoriums and stadiums with people. The kind of artists that have dedicated fans, and that make albums that become collectibles. That has always been the case.
This assumes all artists are alike, which patently they are not. Artists that make amazing music that doesn't stream well, are pretty fucked and their revenue stream from recorded music has basically vanished.
Spotify algorithm filters these artists hard.
I call these artists peak experience artists, they make music you might listen to occasionally, perhaps even just a handful of times, but you don't listen to in the background daily / weekly / monthly.
Whereas' pre streaming to listen to it once you bought a CD for £14.99 and the label got £7 and the artist on an indie got ~£3.50. Now the artist gets <0.01p for that listen.
Huge difference and a chiling effect on the sort of music that can be made.
(I've worked for a big UK indie and currently manage musicians and have seen the trends in music distribution first hand since 1992).
Many artists who happily make Spotify friendly music do handsomely if the algorithm is generous. But many do not and can no longer have a full time career in music.
And no, live shows do not make up the shortfall. Not all artists are comfortable playing live and it's harder for artists to reach critical mass where touring is even possible / profitable.
Unless they are already wealthy, which is why you see again and again the same ilk of rich kids breaking out in music (see Fred Again, Fourtet, etc etc).
I think there is a lot of hindsight bias here. The internet made shelf space unlimited, and artist that used to toil away in absolute obscurity now have a shot. I don't think we're talking about those who would have had a CD on the local store shelves, we're talking about those playing at random bars in their town.
Those labels are now looking for different music.
or people just don’t want to listen to that music as much as you think they do, and would rather listen to Taylor Swift and Drake
I don’t think many people do want to listen to this music. And even fans that do might not listen very frequently.
That music might still be incredible, in the same way that any peak experience is. But by kind of by definition, peak experience is not usually everyday. (see psilocybin etc).
CDs enabled those musicians to make a living. Streams mediated by Spotify, which seems to optimise for background listening, do not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiZVjfjgNyY 6.5m views
https://open.spotify.com/artist/5vSQUyT33qxr1xAX2Tkf3A 3.7m monthly listeners
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_u5iCHi0Jo 16m views
https://open.spotify.com/artist/63MQldklfxkjYDoUE4Tppz 11.5m monthly listeners
> CDs enabled those musicians to make a living.
What you're calling out isn't wrong but what am I supposed to do, subscribe $20/mo of my money to some fringe artist I like on Patreon? What if I like 10 artists? I'm out $200/mo. It's just not realistic. Make music and work a job? I don't know.
Some artists, though not all, (especially older ones who don't want to look like charity cases) allow you to make one off donations, or overpay via Bandcamp for instance. Though Bandcamp and their payment processor take a hefty chunk.
We may see the music that demands focus disappear and everything will drown in Taytay et al. loops
I doubt any artist ever made 23% on a CD sale. The reason artists are paid peanuts now is because it's the same contracts, giving the label all the money.
Majors usually seek to minimise royalties and have many well documented and some less well documented ways to reduce royalties by either chipping away at the headline rate with deductions or shrinking the base price.
But better than nothing as a place to start.
By any chance, would you have some free time to exchange on the matter?
I'm on the other side of the industry, and I'm trying to gain better knowledge of distribution trends nowadays.
I know every artist thinks their unique vision is infinitely priceless but things are actually worth what people are willing to pay for them. If you can’t convince people to hand over money for it, then it’s not worth that much.
Source?
Same with Disney, Netflix, etc.
The goalpost is formal logic, they do not shift, I am not shifting anything;
Argument of a form ‘data X,Y,Z shows Spotify is priced correctly’ would be valid. ‘Spotify have priced correctly because they are <insert definition of Spotify>’ is not logically valid. Like in formal logic, it cannot be valid.
Edit: by real competitor, I mean one that most people will know and hence, can compete. Even monopolies like Google and Facebook have competitors that some random person I ask is likely to know about. Not sure I could say that of Tidal et al.
Heck even if they did raise prices, the record labels will always get 70% of thier revenue.
They’ve never made an annual profit.
Spotify is reluctant to raise prices because it is still focused on growth and also, raising prices doesn’t really improve its margins (it has 75% COGS).
People have different amounts of money and value things differently. $30k to me would represent a significant investment and probably not worth a single plane flight, but a billionaire might spend that to charter a jet for one flight and consider it money well spent. It’s relative.
I really hate it when people try to use government regulation to twist the arm of business for these types of "fair" deals.
What exactly is a "fair" deal ? It's a very complex question and almost impossible to optimise for.
There are some jobs that people don’t have a choice but to work. Being an artist isn’t one of them.
Second, people will consume and like and pay for what’s available to them. If their government decides that an entity like Spotify disadvantages their local artists they can simply add legislation to fix that.
I really don’t like the idea that artists should just give up because some SV types just rendered them useless. Artists are like a glue to the fabric of community, it’ll be a huge loss to have everyone doing stem instead.
With the fragmentation of media in society today, artists aren’t bringing any “community” together.
So now you’re saying the government should come in and save certain types of music? What pray tell do you want the government to do against Spotify?
And how would the government feel today if Spotify top song were NWA’s “Fuck the Police” or Ice T’s “Cop Killer”? would they support those artists?
How are you so sure that some ppl are "meant" to be something. What does this even mean.
What are you meant to be and how do you know?
Yes, fair is complicated, but the decision of what's fair and what isn't is something a society can take and it seems that Uruguay did take that decision. Good for them, I guess.
Is minimum wage also twisting the arm of business? How much would be fair for minimum wage?
Businesses that can't afford to pay a minimum wage can't operate.
Imagine a record label/streaming service had to pay every artist or actor a minimum wage weather or not thier work generated money more than the business invested. I doubt it would be sustainable.
Also, should businessmen making less than minimum wage be compensated by the government to make ends meet?
I think trying to improve the economic situation of the poor by twisting the arms of businesses is bad.
I think the issue of poverty is a serious one and should be addressed by strengthening social safety nets & providing a form of Universal Basic Income.
If it's not sustainable without exploiting the artists, then it shouldn't exist in my opinion. Either prices have to rise or something else has to happen to make things more "fair" (again, I agree that fair is a complicated term and it's hard to put a value on it). Artists aren't employed by streaming services, so the service shouldn't pay minimum wage, but setting a minimum payout or some other measure is something that can be argued for.
> Also, should businessmen making less than minimum wage be compensated by the government to make ends meet?
If the business owner makes less than minimum wage, it's ok by me. Their business, they have to find a way to make it profitable. But it shouldn't be made more profitable by exploiting the people that sustain it.
The government shouldn't compensate the business imo.
> think the issue of poverty is a serious one and should be addressed by strengthening social safety nets & providing a form of Universal Basic Income.
You are arguing against a government giving money to business owners that struggle to make ends meet, but giving UBI without minimum wage does exactly that. You subsidize businesses that don't pay a living wage that otherwise would go bankrupt.
I think things would be different if the power balance wasn't so extremely off between artists and streaming services (or employees and employers in the minimum wage example). But since power is extremely imbalanced, I argue protections should be in place.
Yes exactly. What protections and for whom? Protecting the business or protecting the customers?
Rappers were famous guerrilla marketers back in the day.
I'm sorry noone wants to listen to your garage band anymore because they prefer megastars like Taylor Swift or can listen to the newest K-Pop five seconds after a song was released and uploaded, but that's globalization for you.
Sure, 200 years ago you had to listen to whoever could afford an instrument in your village - regardless of skill - but we don't inhabit that world anymore.
That's exactly the problem. People _are_ still listening to local bands, they're just not paying them to do so.
I doubt the margins from records & CD sales made them a killing.
Otherwise, if we weren't hosting, the money we were paid for playing wasn't even enough to cover band expenses (instrument maintenance, travel costs, etc). Selling merch helped. Selling LPs / EPs was usually just an attempt to make back the cost of recording them in the first place.
If the band was signed, things were different depending on their specific deal. But those bands probably don't count as just "local" anymore, at that point.
I would not vall thr current megastars the pibbacle of skill. In fact its well known they are not chosen based on skill.
I too prefer renting this way, but I don’t think the value proposition is unbelievably good compared to owning.
An album and a half a month?
There are lots of people who would buy dozens of CDs a month. I know many.
Does nobody in the group ever repeat a song?
If yes, then that 400K is double counting (or 50x counting or however many time a song is repeated).
Depending on how much replay, at some point it becomes cheaper to just buy those CDs instead of paying for them over and over every month.
Spotify (and others) are a discovery service that you happen to get some money for. You are trying to get into the algo and if people like it reads that signal and puts it out. It has NOTHING to do with fairness. If your music doesn’t connect with people then, that.
If interested. Work cost circa €600 (mostly from session drummer) and an awful amount of work from me as the producer. Am I annoyed that I may never break even? No because I am realistic about the product I am creating and how it is a pyramid scheme. But I do get to listen to it https://open.spotify.com/track/5MCvIFKabQfN7gnInX12BB?si=RzX...
Stone him!
It’s been out for 18 months and missed the train for any success anyhow :)
On the other hand while they may get more of a percentage of the payout if they don’t deal with labels, they probably will get fewer streams without the marketing.
Streaming music unfortunately needs to be considered marketing for most artist and as a cliche as it sounds - it’s all about live performances and merchandise.
And breaking up the one true monopoly - Ticketmaster
"But they do so much more, like PR and marketing and stuff". Ironically, those who are already big get the biggest PR plus better deals than smaller artists. I don't think we need to raise Spotify prices just so Taylor swift can get even richer.
I think Spotify's aesthetic and design is one of the things that keeps people from moving over to other platforms.
Nobody wants to use programmer art software. And these things are more carefully considered than most people would believe.
Granted, I have this opinion about shovelling money at podcasts creators, and I'm sure someone could tell me the same. But you know, 200mill for Joe Roegan. Ugh.
I’ve long been opposed to piracy and thought copyright laws should be more strictly enforced, for exactly this reason. Yet most people seem to balk at that idea and think they have an absolute moral right to free content. I’m not sure why.
I'm not convinced that people would be willing to go back to Piracy. I think the convenience of being able to listen to any song at any time immediately without having to connect your iPhone to your PC, drag the file over, get them recognised, maybe add some metadata. (I know there'll be more modern approaches to this. I don't think they'll be quite as easy as Spotify)
That's not even mentioning music discovery. Most of my music is now from Discover Weekly.
Seems like many artists are okay with the price, that’s why they stream on Spotify.
There is no true value. That is indeed decided by the people who are willing to pay for it.
However I agree that they shouldn't raise prices.
But you’re not prepared to pay more for that value?
What "different jackals". It's the same jackals who are getting the lion's share: the labels.
How is that possible?
A new CD is around $14 and Spotify is like $12.
And while I get plenty value from my Spotify subscription, I also spend much more on music than I otherwise would have.