fascinating (and gorgeous!) chart showing the evolution of recorded-music revenue over the last 50 years
the first thing that jumps out at me is how much smaller the overall pie is post-streaming. the streaming services and major labels have successfully managed a) to dramatically devalue recorded music and b) to put a much larger percentage of it directly into their own pockets. it's one of the single biggest upward transfers of wealth in history — from artists to billionaire corporations
@Rhube @jimbush you're so right about this, ro. it's at one level a fundamental issue of access and equity! 🖤
also, live isn't always possible from a creative or technical point of view. some artists are very much studio artists. forcing people to rely on live income marginalizes entire segments of creative work!
@hilljam @Rhube @jimbush
The ability to make money from touring is also being squeezed. For years venues have been taking bigger and bigger cuts of ticket/door money and even 50% + cuts on merchandise sales.
Add to that the tour agencies artists are forced to work with...
We need to move into the post-streaming era with something like a P2P artist-run service that completely cuts out labels and streaming platforms.
@maelduin13 @hilljam @Rhube @jimbush it's been ever thus....
"I am the entertainer
I bring to you my songs
I'd like to spend a day or two
I can't stay that long
Naw, I got to meet expenses
I got to stay in line
Gotta get those fees to the agencies
And I'd love to stay but there's bills to pay
So I just don't have the time" <Billy Joel>
@hilljam @samnabi @aredridel I'm not sure it's all that simple, this report for UK gov suggests there's a bit more nuance around streaming reconfiguring who gets paid for what https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/614c760fd3bf7f719095b5ad/music-creators-earnings-report.pdf
(With the big caveat this just looks at 2000s and not historical earnings - which I would love to see but haven't anywhere)
Thank you for sharing this. Feels a little disorienting without a defined Y axis, but indeed pretty
Yeah, this is a picture I'd use to explain to students what a graph is not.
No y-scale, weird wobbles for no apparent reason, and that dreadful stacked format that is generally difficult for people to interpret in non-misleading ways even when it doesn't float randomly around the x-axis.
Freaking gorgeous, though.
I’m not sure why. Vinyl is purely a niche market, some of the record players on the market absolutely tear up peoples expensive vinyl (just as they always did) (people who aren’t audiophiles but just stupid people who think it’s cool to own vinyl) meanwhile I can fit on my phone with very good audio quality what used to take a whole room of shelving. I know which I prefer.
Ah, that's the mystery of our age... All those tech giants have quasi monopoles, squeezing out competitors, paying the absolute minimum those actually doing the work, capturing the customers making it hard to leaving and decimating entire sectors that used to be thriving... And yet, don't make profits. (I'm thinking Spotify, but also the likes of Uber, Unity and many more)...
All the money goes in "fees" changed by the venture funds...
There's that, as well.
@hilljam funny, just yesterday I read a post about how CDs were the golden era - and look what a chunk they were!
Interestingly enough, I got a CD for the first time in ages this year (a request for my birthday) because I wanted the artist to be paid and I wanted to keep it as physical media. A small drop in the ocean, alas.
For an album release this guy made more money from a donation link on piracy sites than he did from Spotify
A lot. And that’s also the reason labels were able to gouge customers for CDs and CD rereleases initially. And that included not making CD singles available, so in some cases a 45 you’d buy for one song in the vinyl era would cost 16 dollars for the CD. So they ripped people off. And then torrent type digital downloads came along and that put a huge dent in that meal ticket. Eventually, they were forced to settle for digital downloads and streaming as main revenue sources.
There were SOME CD singles. But for most hit songs that wasn’t the case. It got to the point where in December 1998 Billboard completely changed their Hot 100 chart to allow non singles to chart.
Before that, a hit had to be physically available as a single in some retail form to chart. This resulted in I believe 63 debuts on the Hot 100 that week if you compared it to their real published Hot 100 from the week before and not the published test chart from the previous week.
@hilljam this looks awesome. I would love to enphasize that corporations take a bigger share from the streaming revenue than they did from physical sales- because spotify is largely owned by the major labels. And with music as a service artists become much more replaceable- so they dont get to negotiate as much as they did back in the day. Its a bad time to be an artist.
Edit: spotify is not largely owned by major labels. It's another large company though.
@FlippoFlip @hilljam Spotify is not largely owned by the major record labels and never was. The highest stake they ever had in Spotify was 18%. This has dropped over time.
@FlippoFlip @hilljam The reasons majors take a bigger share from digital than physical is two-fold:
1) digital distribution costs are far lower, so less goes to retailers and distributors;
2) many records, especially older ones, are on old deals that pre-dated streaming and assign a smaller percentage to uses like this because nobody knew they'd become the main revenue source.
Many artists are fighting to fix point 2.
But for me, the bigger problem is the devaluation of music to $10/month.
That doesn't mean artists get more money.
https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/streaming/how-much-does-spotify-pay-per-stream
@kylotan @FlippoFlip @hilljam
The tech industry behavior in no way absolves labels of their responsibility in milking musicians.
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