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It Took a Couple Decades, But the Music Business Looks Like It's Okay Again (recode.net)
According to latest number from RIAA, music sales in the first half of the year were up 8.4 percent, to $3.4 billion -- the best performance the music industry has seen since its peak days back in the CD era. Recode adds: That boom is fueled entirely by the growth of paid subscription services. This year's numbers include Apple Music, which didn't exist a year ago but has 17 million worldwide subscribers today, as well as Spotify, which has been growing faster than Apple and has 40 million global subs. Digital downloads via stores like iTunes, meanwhile, are falling behind. Those sales dropped 17 percent to $1 billion. And some people still buy CDs, but soon that business will be a footnote: Those sales dropped 14 percent and now make up just 20 percent of U.S. sales. All good, right? Not according to Cary Sherman, who runs the RIAA, the labels' American trade group. He has a Medium post complaining that YouTube doesn't pay enough for all the music it streams, almost all of which is free.
now they can't blame piracy for poor sales.
Re: YouTube not paying enough.
Pick one of the above. You can't have both, you can't pick both. You get to exert an outsized control over the medium which is going to cost much of that profit in the form of maintaining the outsized control. People are clever and will figure out ways around automated filters and counters for no other reason than because they can. It's a challenge to overcome. Countering that takes time, effort, and most importantly money.
Or you can give up the outsized control and get the profit from the views on your "channel" or whatever self-organization YT comes up with next. That's the way it works. You can try making your own streaming platform, but I'm fairly certain we all know how that's going to work out. Complaining about it isn't going to change anything.
The record labels, hell, the media business in general had all the warnings that their world was changing and they had best get along with it. But those in charge stuck their heads in the sand and ignored it. This is the result.
I was so worried about the poor RIAA.
Profits are up? woohoo they've survived high speed tape cassette dubbing! -err I mean the latest copying technology/piracy.
Safe in this newfound knowledge I can sleep well again.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Things happen in cycles - there's no steady state - unfortunately the negative always makes better news than the positive. Glad this positive made some news channels, although I suspect the record industry would rather have kept it quiet - spread the doom and gloom.
The record industry clearly sees Youtube as a value advertising mechanism or they wouldn't be uploading every video they make to Youtube. As for the rest, they're essentially adding a new revenue stream by monetizing home video.
if the entertainment cartel thugs didn't crush some artists even as they chose who to pimp, if they didn't use government goons to kick in doors for their agenda of terrorism, if they didn't act as monopoly....why you might have a point.
I bought an album from Bandcamp. That's as far as I go.
About is profits, and about the latest music distribution technology - this goes back to the days when the music industry made money by selling sheet music, and faced the threat of wax cylinders, player piano rolls, then radio play, etc.
Back in the 1990s, when profits were at a (then) all time high, due to people replacing their LP and cassette collections with CDs, the industry was complaining about piracy and got a tax on blank CDs imposed, a straight up subsidy for a highly profitable industry based on zero evidence.
There has never been a new music distribution technology that was not claimed to be a threat to the industry's profits. Another eternal verity - every profit peak is taken to be the "natural" profit level that only despicable piracy could be responsible for eroding.
Actually it is worse than that. The growth rate ramping up to the peak is claimed to be the "natural" state of the industry and year-after-year perpetual profit growth is "normal" and any reduction is due to those nefarious pirates. (And now direct music sales! The horror! Musicians selling music direct to fans! This must not be allowed to grow!)
But an industry whose revenue is due entirely to controlling access to the creativity of other people is like that.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
From what I've read, there's no money to be squeezed from YT right now. The service started in the red and has generally stayed there. Complaining will only generate so much hot air.
If these media companies want to see YT fail and go away that is going to be akin to cutting a leg off to spite their marathon time. Of course, these are the sorts of short-sighted people that they'd do that on the wish that everything would go back to the way it was before the internet got all the kids so uppity and wanting culture to become responsive to their needs and views and not those of the shareholders and market makers.
Technology marches on. There was a time when expensive recording processes lead to expensive presses to create shellac, and then to the expensive process to record music onto cheaper-to-make tape. Without digital computers to handle all the engineering, engineers had to manually adjust the recording of a record, making the grooves wider or narrower to fit the sound being recorded as you moved toward the inner spiral; this all had to transfer to a master record, used to produce negatives which were then pressed to create records. Those eventually wore out (well, got damaged well before that), and you'd have to make more, until the original masters used to make stamping presses were no longer usable and had to be recreated.
The same problem comes with tape: a copy of a copy loses fidelity, and the master tape eventually wears out from use, so you're using a copy of a copy of a copy (copy the master to the tape used for duplication, then duplicate from that), and the damn tapes take forever to record. The process was simpler, though, and digital mastering tapes are easily copied without error; thus you can have perfect back-ups of the master source, the final mix, and the tapes used in the duplicator to make the analog product.
Digital electronics eventually brought CDs, which are digital, easy to duplicate perfectly, and easier to press than records and tapes. CDs are pressed into polycarbonate, then backed by aluminum foil, and lacquered to protect the foil layer. The material is cheaper and easier to handle than shellac or lacquer; recording is a pressing operation; and the masters are easier to reproduce than gramophone masters. This is a lot cheaper than tape.
Now we have digital distribution, which costs near-nothing. Millions of dollars go into services which distribute millions of songs to millions of subscribers. Spotify has 20 million songs in its portfolio, 40 million *paying* users, over 100 million total users, and 1 billion streams per day. Spotify pays literally several million dollars for its infrastructure costs, and almost $2 billion for licensing fees. The physical cost is around a dollar per 10,000 songs streamed, or 1/100 of a cent per song.
Tell me why they shouldn't ship more units for less revenue when their costs are now damn near nothing. The cost of music production isn't that much lower; but a $2 CD with 10 songs is still 2,000 times as expensive per song as digital distribution. It's so much more expensive that we don't even just download the damned things once; we REPEATEDLY RE-BUY THE SAME SONG BY STREAMING IT OVER AND OVER AGAIN, because the cost of distributing a song is one one-hundredth of a cent and we have to buy it a hundred times to spend a penny. The fair cost, considering production cost, may be 5 cents or it may be a dollar per song; and almost 100% of that is production cost, while distribution costs nothing.
Distribution used to carry a hefty cost. Now any moron with a $50 microphone and a laptop can record, master, and distribute his own music. If you're using digital production (Modplug Tracker), you don't even need special equipment like instruments. Why should the music industry represent the same revenue per unit shipped as it has in the past? If it did that, it would represent literally dozens of times the profit.
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Slashdot linked to a recode post, which linked to a medium post, which linked to an RIAA blog post which linked the actual report put out by them with the relevant numbers. To save the same minor trouble, here is the actual report that includes the numbers cited above:
http://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/RIAAMidyear16.pdf
Why oh why can't bloggers do this simple homework and link to original sources? This used to standard etiquette among the blogosphere, did it not? Anyway, you're welcome.
After a decade or so of blaming piracy for its own internal lack of vision, the music industry is finally looking good again since it finally embraced technology to give its customers what they want.
FU, make some good music and I might buy it.
If you think that no piece of music available is "good" enough to buy, the problem may not be with the music.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
and they still kick in the wrong door of person who isn't downloading. they still have politicians in their pocket who make laws that cost even those not their customers. problem remains.
I thought Cary Sherman passed on to his eternal reward a few years ago. Maybe it was just wishful thinking.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
I was so worried about the people in between me and the music I like, earning their 98%.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I could be wrong, but observation shows me that there are two things at play simultaneously:
1. The majority of the profit comes from younger individuals who [want|need] NOW. They don't tend to think of ways to hack around the bad system that makes them pay for something they shouldn't have to pay for, so their demand and "I [want|need] it NOW" mentality drives them toward the thing that gets them what they want with a payment (slews of different ways to download music and pay). Google makes it easy, Apple makes it easy. Those are the two majority OS players.
2. The individuals generating the numbers are the same ones, or different people under the same superior. It's never okay to say "we lost but we're still alive" when it comes to superiority complexes the corp execs all suffer from, so why not issue the statement, "We are doing great, actually. Better than the last newfangled thing crazy of them CD things. Thanks!" It's a game play. Your move.
I say generating, because there isn't any possible way that they could meet two situational criteria simultaneously without a free handout from the government (which really means you're fine, just getting income from another source); they can't be "suffering" from "pirates" and ALSO "doing wonderful" at the same time. It seems like a typical mental flapping to tell the enemy it didn't win in order to encourage the enemy to stop bothering trying to win. Either you're suffering from piracy or you're not. Government assistance overrides suffering, thus doesn't count in the argument.
All I can really see as a possible truth is the companies/lawyers having such a scare system in place that it actually worked and only smart people that they aren't gonna outsmart remain, and that's just fine for their numbers. Or even better, perhaps they were fine the whole time and the loss of sales/income was from financial hardships of consumers which has now evened out, giving them the impression that they are fine as a result of their efforts and material; perhaps they would have been not equal but close enough to call it equal, to what would have happened if piracy hadn't consumed their attention and efforts. The economy sucked. When it sucks, you drop in numbers, too. Simple psychological reasoning, and bias as a constant, state that they may be older folks with narcissistic complexes, but "got played" themselves. i.e. There wasn't a huge problem to begin with, and now that you see what you want to, the problem seems to have lowered. Funny part is, the more you try to stop something, the more people do it and circumvent your efforts. How would those numbers look if you just left crap alone and presented new awesome stuff that people would buy when they have the means. Art, visual or auditory, is something you can't TAKE FROM PEOPLE. It's going to go on whether you're part or not.
You only get a piece of the proverbial pie when it's the best and most economical for all in the mix. I'm talking art, FWIW.
...even better if they included Google Play Music numbers. A lot of my friends subscribe to the Google Play Music Family plans which gives unlimited music to the subscriber and 4 family members. The problem that has been pointed out by other posters is that many people are not purchasing music anymore they are just leasing it from one of the four or five streaming services. The music industry is effectively being held up by a crutch that is "Unlimited Music Streaming" and it isn't going to get better since the Millennials love to get stuff as fast as possible. They are the instant gratification generation. I have to admit that I subscribe to Google Play Music, but I did it because all my CDs were stolen when my storage locker was broke into right after I graduated college. I decided not to repurchase most of the CDs and have been streaming ever since. I have slowly purchased some of my go to bands CDs again, but my collection will probably never reach the 1500 some odd CDs that I used to own.
Wait a second... So if you allow people to conveniently buy music in a format they'll actually use, they'll buy it? That's insane! Who could have thought that would happen?
the artist that doesn't use those are one of the kind they crush
>> It Took a Couple Decades, But the Music Business Looks Like It's Okay Again
Oh thank goodness, it was a close call for a moment for all those parasite middle-men. NOT. Unfortunately.
Has the Record Industry wised up and stopped suing their customers yet? If so, I might start buying music again.
Now, we can all slap ourselves on the back for helping the big guys successfully regain control and define the music business model. Now the old labels that took advantage of their musicians and have now turned into the streaming services who take advantage of their musicians. Exposure relies on their algorithms, their accounting is always in *their* books, nobody ever seems to "own" or even know where their music is anymore, and the still musician always seems to end up with the smallest share of it all at the end of the day. It's almost like we missed a brief window of a decade where all the possibilities were there...but now we've all been corralled back into their "accepted revenue channels". Now that they can all sigh a big sigh of relief that it's all gonna work out ok for their 401ks...I think they will eventually turn their attention to all the stashes of "unlicensed media" that all of us have on our systems. And I'm betting between all of us here, that's considerable. Just a prediction...but that has to be the next step, no?
FU, make some good music and I might buy it. Else, fuck you RIAA nazis.
Ah, nothing like blaming the landlord when your slice of hot apple pie is served cold at your favorite restaurant.
Good luck with that, idiot.
Yeah, well when the landlord is claiming to be the arbiter of all pies and he should get the money before distributing it to the pie makers then sure.
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Artists are still being jacked. I have family in a band that has toured the states, have award winning music videos, and cut several CDs, but haven't received a fucking penny from anything but concerts.
That'll be because they fucked up and signed a record deal.
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