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Comment by morsch | Hacker News Reader

Revenue is broadly in line with what it's been: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

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.

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I think what may be happening is that we hear loudly and often from the mega-stars who used to comfortably earn millions from each new album release or even single release and now get lower streaming revenue. But we never hear from the hundreds of thousands of "long tail" smaller performers who previously would've earned zero within a couple years after releasing their last CD, but who now get a small but steady trickle of income from streaming. I've got dozens of songs on my Spotify playlist that the world has entirely forgotten about in terms of radio or public exposure, and the performers themselves might be middle-aged realtors or office workers by now who have entirely given up their music careers, but their songs were little earworms to me back in 2003 so I still play them occasionally. Not that the people negatively impacted don't have cause for complaint. But we're only hearing one side of the story.

They're slashing royalties to the very same long-tail artists you think you're supporting.

> 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...

That's ostensibly to deter the proliferation of noise and programmatically generated junk where one "artist" might upload hundreds or thousands of tracks in the hope of getting paid due to accidental clicks and the like.

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 think what may be happening is that we hear loudly and often from the mega-stars who used to comfortably earn millions from each new album release or even single release and now get lower streaming revenue.

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...

Revenue is NOWHERE NEAR what it was - you’re neglecting to click on the graph that says “value (adjusted for inflation)”. The graph is a clear indication of an industry trying to transform itself by whatever means having been repeatedly decimated. If the entire US music industry was a company, it wouldn’t even make it into the S&P 500.

I clicked the button. It's literally within a few percent of where it was 30 years ago, adjusted for inflation. I call that broadly in line. Yes, it was much bigger in 2000, and much smaller in 2010, also bigger in 1978 and smaller in 1982.

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.

It looks about 40% lower, not a few percent. I’m not denying that the recorded music industry has been totally overcome, and in some senses they’re lucky to have anything at all from Spotify, but almost everyone in society wants recorded music and the revenue side of it is dying, indeed, almost completely killed except for those at the very top of the pyramid. This hasn’t happened in the same way in other intellectual industries. It is how it is, but it’s a shame that something we all want has to be expensively done and then given away basically for free.

I can go to my basement, lay down a track on a free daw that comes with my audio interface with an arbitrary number of tracks if I so please, then take that material and distribute it around the world on the internet.

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.

How much money have you made doing this recently?

In theory through services like bandcamp infinitely more money than if I was passing around CDs or tapes.

What about in reality through services like Bandcamp?

40% lower from the peak, which led to an even larger decline with the birth of Napster.

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.

I mean this is what live music is for. Concerts have always been the best way to make money.

The Beatles didn’t seem to think so.

Ah yes, let's use the most successful band of all time as the example not the exception

They did say always! I’m pointing out it’s not quite always.

In the history of music performing is how artists made money.

The studio album age of the 60s and 70s are the exception not the rule.

Might be smaller lately because what's produced nowadays is crap. Things exciting this year came from Stones and Beatles, you figure :)

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.

There has always been a lot of crap. The reason people think it was better in the old days because most of the crap was forgotten and is not played on the oldies station.

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

This is such a tired argument. Even the "crap" back then had professional songwriters and musicians playing actual instruments with some semblance of artistry. Go listen to the global top 50 on Spotify and it's hard to even call it music. It's generally the same trap/reggaeton beat with some autogenerated ambient sounds and someone mumbling in triplets over it. Almost none of it is memorable or original, and has very little artistic merit IMO. It's basically AI generated emotionless bytes.

Old people have always complained about music of this generation being crap. Even in my lifetime, people complained about rap music of the early 80s and the 90s that are now considered classics.

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.

> Even the "crap" back then had professional songwriters and musicians playing actual instruments

Ah, you mean the same four chords in succession: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I

There are only so many chords, this means nothing. Songs can use the same chords and be totally unique.

> Might be smaller lately because what's produced nowadays is crap. Things exciting this year came from Stones and Beatles, you figure

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.

Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap. There was lots of crap pre-2000, you just never hear it.

You're describing your bubble. In mine, young women rappers are being discovered in droves, previously on youtube and now tiktok. They don't have Death Row tier production quality, but by the time they make it to Spotify, they're putting out bangers.

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.

“70+ teenagers” in London - Europe’s most diverse city. I don’t believe there’s a need for the condescending implication about the poster’s “nuclear family” or “bubble” and I’d posit that a majority of those teenagers don’t live in nuclear families. This is a much broader phenomenon. Young people will always find new music to listen to, but there is a crisis in musical innovation in the 21st century, essentially whereby any new music made within it cannot escape from the patterns laid down in the 20th century. Teenagers are likely listening to pre-2000 music because there is simply no 21st century music to be had.

Your argument is ridiculous on its face. Modern music has thrown out the very nature of musicality. Bartók is considered unlistenable by most people to this day, and he died in 1945. Kids these days are circuit bending, producing a noisome din without rhythm, melody, or anything remotely pleasing to your ear. And yet, I've been to packed concerts (albeit tiny venues). The shackles of the second millennium are thrown off. What is free jazz, anyway?

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.

I feel like you’re talking to yourself. By all means tell us what free jazz is, and whether anything recent has bettered it for quality or freeness compared to jazz of the 20th century. And do take a trip to London one day if you need to understand what diversity looks like in a world metropolis before lecturing.

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

The bluster is mostly for fun, but I was rather set off by this statement:

> 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?

Nah my kids listen to stuff like this: https://youtu.be/XR9d4ESlpHY?si=57C9KOBVssCWtsbO

and this: https://youtu.be/NVjSycDJatc?si=9lIug-ay5ROvuNvt

and this: https://youtu.be/IYnuXnuaFNY?si=MGhr4dmfyfBQb0RU

and this: https://youtu.be/lKOGgH40d_0?si=iqIBytn3q2EhCdxG

and this: https://youtu.be/SLvFsP1izS4?si=x4kqT9a8foBmtvjn

Anyway, here's a couple recent faves from your neck of the woods, both born within a few years of the turn of the century:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT9OJE2mj4E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWme81uDHiw

My ears are closed

There is no crisis of innovation after all, you just don't want to hear it.

Listening to these two tracks I think the point stands that music is struggling to escape the patterns laid down for it in the 20th century. This music is new without being novel, ie it’s not unreasonable to think they couldn’t have been made and been functionally identical in the 90s, whereas they couldn’t have been made in the 50s.

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.

London must be yearning for the older times

Even if adjusted for inflation, it seems middling rather than "nowhere near what it was" and it seems to grow as well.

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.

The early CD era represented a pre-web period where people were not only making regular run rate music purchases but also replacing some amount of the vinyl they already owned. (And cassette as sibling post mentions.)

> because we got CD's for easy distribution

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.

>If the entire US music industry was a company, it wouldn’t even make it into the S&P 500.

Market cap =/= revenue

Ok slight miscalculation, having looked again, by revenue it would be around the size of the 250th largest company, ie the recorded music industry has the same revenues as GAP or Nordstrom. If GAP disappeared overnight, few would be impacted. If all recorded music disappeared overnight, it would be a disaster. Ok piracy then, and free music, but I think there’s a serious crisis in the production of new and innovative music, and it’s indicative that recorded music was a 20th century phenomenon.

Another miscalculation by a factor of ~2: you’re only looking US music revenues.

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.

it is not my duty to have jayz make another 100 million There are some really rich musicians and music industry people.

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

No.

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).

Very interesting take I can only agree with.

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.

How did these amazing artists that no one really listened to get their CD in the store?

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.

They were signed by labels who also made money from the sale of those records.

Those labels are now looking for different music.

> Spotify algorithm these artists hard

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

Let me try and explain again, because I think you missed something.

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.

Songs that are incredible but I don't want to listen to it every day:

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.

Why are you thinking solely in terms of subscription?

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.

It is at least a reasonable hypothesis that people bought some CDs they loved but listened to rarely as an experience. Whereas a lot of people including myself much more commonly listen to streaming service playlists as background.

There have always been artists who languished in obscurity. They had no chance of distribution before the internet.

That’s a great take on the background vs focused listening.

We may see the music that demands focus disappear and everything will drown in Taytay et al. loops

> 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.

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.

Many indies offer a 50/50 net profit split. At volume the costs become quite small with CDs.

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.

With some indie aggregators that upload your music to Spotify you can get 100% royalties: https://artists.spotify.com/providers (only going by the descriptions)

Indeed. But by using one you are tacitly signalling to the industry you are not a serious player. Typically 10-15% is what you'd pay now an aggregator that caters to recognised artists and labels.

But better than nothing as a place to start.

I can corroborate this experience.

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.

> Revenue is broadly in line with what it's been: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

> 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.

I’m willing to bet that the average poor college student I knew in school was buying at least one album a month—albeit sometimes secondhand and I probably bought a lot more than that after graduation.

The total revenue of CDs sold in 1999 (Peak CD) was $938 million.

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

I believe those are US units not revenues. So depending on how you count relevant consumers that’s actually close to 10 CDs per year per person.

Which puts music purchases in the rough ballpark of streaming which is probably not coincidental.

That’s about 5 CDs per adult then.

Yes. But most music purchases were probably people from about their late teens through about their 30s. So the relevant adult population is probably quite a bit smaller.

Point is you’re looking at on the order of $100 per year plus or minus.

No one makes money when I play the Funkadelic album I've owned for the past 20 years, but my SO can't make it two or three songs without an ad on Spotify.

Distribution costs are lower without, so any reduction in CD sales seem easily offset by digital sales, ads, etc.

> most people were buying 10, or 20, or 30, or more CDs a year

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.

Yeah I mean, I wish people would illustrate their anecdotes with statistics, right? Oh wait, I did. I even alluded to the fact that I was an outlier in not buying CDs in the late nineties. But then the rest of the world got the message. And now we're spending as much on renting music as we did buying it in the eighties.

> Revenue is broadly in line with what it's been

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.

No, I clicked the adjust for inflation button. You do have a point re: population growth -- the per-capita spend on music is smaller than it was.

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.

> No, I clicked the adjust for inflation button.

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 guess that's probably true. Though the Walkman and its descendants have been popular since the 80s, and music radio was very accessible and routinely running in the background in situations where people now listen to Spotify.

> Revenue is broadly in line with what it's been:

More precisely revenue has just caught up to the level it was 30 years ago

I agree and I see it with my own music habits. I do listen to Apple Music stuff all the time, but really there are a handful of artists I value personally and can recognise by name. Even today, I continue to buy their vinyl records not really for the purpose of listening but just because it's a cool way to support them outside of streaming.

It would be interesting to know how the amount (hours) of music being listened to changed over time, in comparison. With streaming and radio, it correlates in time, whereas with physical media and downloads, purchases stretch over time in relation to when you listen to them, and the revenue is decoupled from how much you listen to it.

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