Hacker News Reader

Comment by gizajob | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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?

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.

London must be yearning for the older times

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.)

>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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com