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Music Streaming Hailed as Industry's Saviour as Labels Enjoy Profit Surge (theguardian.com)
Not long ago, the music industry was losing money left and right. Recession, rampant piracy, falling CD sales and a fear that "kids just don't buy music any more" had giant record labels, once oozing wealth, counting the pennies. But that all changed this year, and the industry's saviour is not what many predicted. From a report on The Guardian: Profits from music streaming, first championed by Spotify and now offered by Apple and Amazon, have given some labels their largest surge in revenue in more than a decade. At the beginning of December, one of the world's biggest labels, Warner Music, announced revenues of $3.25bn this year -- its highest in eight years. More significantly, $1bn of that was from streaming, more than double its download revenue and more than $100m more than its physical revenue. The surge in profits is being seen across all the major labels. In the first half of 2016, streaming revenue in the US grew by 57% to $1.6bn, and worldwide digital revenues overtook those from physical sales for the first time in music industry history, mainly because of streaming. This year's most-streamed artist was Drake, with 4.2bn streams.
... and I've never ever paid a dime for it, or watched any ads. Who the f... pays for something that can easily be found for free? Are there really so many nutters around? Lol!
For, without whom, we'd have to RIP CDs. Instead, we can get 256 kbps MP3s that make shit today sound good...better...don't care!
Piracy was only ever a symptom of the problem, not the cause. What's the problem? Music labels sticking their heads in the sand and ignoring changes to the consumer landscape. They were so used to dictating terms that they thought they would always get away with it. So much so that they continued trying even in the face of lost profits and outright consumer hostility.
Not that I ever thought piracy was ever that big of a contributor to the losses, mind you. I think they lost more from folks like me who started refusing to buy full albums for a single song, or pay 15-20 for a single album altogether.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
"YouTube's $1 Billion Royalties Are Not Enough, Says Music Industry"
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
Yet they keep bitching for more...
I look for more and more artists to cut out the record label middle(expensive)men and start individual releases. Which - more money in their pockets. Which means, more great music being produced.
Funny how the "online" model was so vilified by the same people now getting profits from it.
...not "artists"? Am I right to be cautious in assuming one follows the other?
What does "industry" mean in this context exactly?
the numbers say revenue but the headline says profit. Sames goes for the article...
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
"Not long ago, the music industry was losing money left and right."
Are we all supposed to accecpt that as fact? The kind of accounting they do will prove that they never make money and rarely owe artists any royalties.
"better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things" - Linus Torvalds 09-08-07
The record label is behind all the big "artists" right now. People like Taylor Swift who have everything done for them, and all they have to do is get up on stage and look cute and do some unimpressive singing. Even just fifteen years ago, these "artists" could at least dance around like Britney Spears.
Fact is, the true artists get buried while the ones under control get all the advertising, all the airtime, all the publicity.
... first championed by Spotify and now offered by Apple
I'm pretty sure Spotify was late to the game... they just had a service that was more popular. I listened to Pandora, and later Slacker for a long time before I had even heard of Spotify.
Back in my day, streaming was called "Radio"
Radio was great, it worked almost anywhere, you had choice of "channel" and there were no data caps.We could turn on the radio and listen to as much of it we wanted, all for the cost of a few watts of electricity/battery power.
Cars come fitted with them too. Had them small battery powered ones that could fit in your pocket too, could have multiple radios going all at the same time and still no data caps.
I'm not going to say Swift doesn't have any talent, I do believe she does, but in general I agree with your observation. As the labels have become more and more simply a department of larger corporate machines, the willingness to go out on a limb has faded. There are no more Led Zeppelins, or even U2s. It's just a bunch of autotuned R&B acts.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Of course the best outcome is everyone goes indie and the RIAA dies quickly, but that's just a dream.
And here's why it's a dream: One of the common death throes of a dying company is copyright, patent, or trademark assertion. Once bands start owning their own compositions and recordings, the music publishers that share a parent company with the major record labels will start suing bands on grounds of accidental copyright infringement: "Your song sounds too much like one of our songs. Pay us." What's a good way to avoid such lawsuits other than becoming a licensed cover band or leaving music altogether?
A surge in revenue without a surge in expenses necessarily produces a surge in profit. The featured article doesn't appear to mention expenses. So which expenses might have also surged?
All of this will happen again, given how backwards and recalcitrant the movie/music industries are when it comes to new technology.
They said the exact same thing about the VCR. They fought it tooth and nail, were forced to accept it by the courts, and a couple decades later most of their revenue came from videotape and later DVD sales and rentals instead of theater releases. They fought movie rentals tooth and nail, were forced to accept it by the courts, and a decade later something like half of their revenue came from movie rentals. They fought DAT (digital audio tape) tooth and nail, actually won and succeeded in making the product fail in the market. Only to be overwhelmed by the inevitable tide of technological progress as CD-Rs and eventually MP3/FLAC served the same function as DAT.
Consumer data are gold.
Nothing. Amazing progress
For every Madonna, there were 20 turkeys that lost the label money.
Are still taking losses like a mofo. Your streaming services are heavily subsidized by VC capital.
Finding obscure cover songs or fresh content, nowhere to be found today even if it's not free. The **AA took that away, the artists still don't get jack, why is that progress again?
For every Madonna, there were 20 turkeys that lost the label money.
Well to me this is the only negative with losing the labels, A&R power. In the old days labels would take a chance on nurturing new talent, yes, most would fail but if one hit it, boom, they were huge. That one success more than made up for the failures, it was worth the risk. Labels no longer invest in new talent, they want already self established "potential stars". I think it's very important to invest in and encourage new talent.
Is not what many predicted? WTF did they predict to restore profits - musical skill?
I've been listening to broadcast radio my entire life and enjoyed it, and I used to listen to Shoutcast/Icecast internet radio (before the music industry more or less destroyed it), so at one point I thought I'd give these streaming music services a try. Lasted about half an hour for me before I got sick of it. Would let me skip things I didn't want to hear more of, but after so many it stopped letting me do that, and while it claimed to 'learn' what I liked, it kept throwing stuff at me from bands I've never heard of, and didn't really like all that much. In the end it wasn't any better than broadcast radio, even if there are commercials on radio, because I'd have to mute it or turn the volume down until I got past something I didn't care to hear. More trouble to change streams than it is to change stations on a radio. Haven't gone back. I'll either listen to my own locally-stored music or listen to FM radio (if I'm driving). You'd have a difficult-to-impossible time convincing me to pay for streaming music. As another datapoint to add to the above, several years ago I stopped paying for cable TV and put up an antenna because I decided I was paying too much for something I was using maybe 10% of at best. I've never paid for digital-only downloaded music (and never would, especially if it was DRM-laden), I'll go find a CD and buy that. I really feel that so many people have been fed the 'digital streaming kool-aid' and the reason they do it is because that's what they know, and that it's not all it's cracked up to be. Then there's the issue of the artists not getting paid a fair amount for their content.
The music industry fought hard against streaming music services, claiming they would destroy the music industry, and what they tried to kill has actually saved them. This is just more evidence that the music industry does not understand their customers or their own industry. They blamed pirates for the falling profits when studies has shown casual pirates to be some of the biggest spending customers of legal music. Maybe the obvious point should have been that pirates do not like to wait for their music and would happily pay for service that gives them immediate access to the music they crave.
While streaming may have saved the music industry, it is also just one technology that illustrates how the world has moved on from the traditional music distribution methods. A artist can sell directly to their customers through streaming services, leaving the big labels with less control over the industry and providing content producers with much more freedom to profit from their work. There have been many stories pointing out how little artists have been paid by their labels which kept the bulk of the profits. Successful but broke artists can be a thing of the past.
Consumers win through easier access to music and by having more music to choose from.
First of all, there was a shift in revenue for the last several years. People were moving from physical to digital as various platforms dragged the industry kicking and screaming into the year 2000. Labels were not "losing money left and right", their revenues dipped briefly as the changes were made. Digital music sales surged for a number of years. While it may or may not offset the losses from the albums as the industry sued everyone, the shift happened.
Secondly, piracy is responsible for offsetting many of the losses. Studies have shown that people who pirate music are often the music industries biggest customers. This is little more than RIAA whining that it's no longer 1975 and the labels using piracy as a scapegoat. The RIAA is notorious for fabricating losses (at one point, even going so far as to claim they lost the entire GDP of France in a year). Someone has been reading one too many RIAA press releases.
Virtually every problem the RIAA faces can be attributed to wrongheaded thinking on the RIAA's part (suing teenagers and grandparents, three strikes laws, DRM, attempted INDUCE act, attempted SOPA, ripping off artists with terrible contracts, 360 "deals"). If they listened to the people on the ground for the last decade+ who said that they needed to adapt to a changing marketplace, they would still be an overwhelming dominant force in the market today. Instead, they opened the door for independently run labels and independent artists who didn't want this whole "internet thing" "to just go away".
Daily read for tech news: Freezenet.ca
The goal needs to be the complete *destruction* of the music industry as we know it. We cannot rest until 100% of the profits for music go to the artists (including sound engineers and all that) who create that music. We must keep fighting until the RIAA and all its members are bankrupt. This is far from over.
I don't know about anyone else but the moment I started using Pandora and then Spotify, that's the moment I knew this was the future of music.
I couldn't have predicted how much profit there was to be made but I could tell you, buying music was dead. Any profits were going to have to be made from streaming. Oh, and live shows. CD? Dead. Downloads? Dead! Niedermeier? DEAD!!
I don't know why you're downvoted, but you're correct. They used to understand it would take a couple albums to make a band or singer popular. Nowadays if you aren't popular in one, you're gone.
So can I upload just any song on YouTube without worry about consequences? For instance, can I rip old albums and upload that to YouTUbe and other services?
There's plenty of great music out there. You have to go looking for it in the indie bands. Don't expect to be spoon fed music great music over the top-40 radio stations and you will fall in love with music again.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And how many people were extorted or sued by their idiotic tactics in the meantime?
While I am glad they have addressed their ignorance, I will not be upset if the continued proliferation of indie labels castrates their influence over time.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
And I don't. I frequent Bandcamp, and most of my big label purchases are to repurchase music I owned on cassette tape. Besides, the indie scene has far more interesting music. Some of the prog rock, art rock and experimental rock acts are astounding (being that this is the music I like to listen to most often). The next generation of King Crimsons and Porcupine Tree are on Bandcamp, because the big labels wouldn't touch these kinds of acts with a ten foot pole.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What service can I use to download to my stand-alone mp3 player ? I really don't care if they only play for a limited time, I just need a variety I can play while I am out fishing and have no network connection. I routinely stream at home or where I have Wi-Fi, but at the river I don't get cell phone service thus have no network access at all and buying CD's is getting harder to do.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
And wait because we're due for another 20 years extension
Unlikely. In the past century, there has been only one major change in the underlying rationale of how the U.S. copyright term is set. The Copyright Act of 1978 and the interim extensions that preceded it represented a switch from the 1909 standard to the "life of grandchildren" standard used in the rest of the industrialized world, and the Copyright Term Extension of 1998 (sometimes called the Sonny Bono Act) only reflected that the fact that improved healthcare has caused grandchildren to live longer than when the Berne Convention was first adopted. When the Supreme Court upheld the life expectancy-driven Bono Act in Eldred v. Ashcroft, it warned the people that it was watching for "legislative misbehavior". So if the next seven years bring neither a new rationale nor drastic healthcare improvements, which means the works establishing Mickey and Pooh will enter the public domain in the United States at the end of 2023.
I don't listen to music using the streaming sites because they never play anything I want to hear. I signed up for a paid week of either Pandora or Spotify and didn't even use it past the first hour. I found that completely free sites and apps like Iheartradio work the same way - you look for a specific song, and if you're lucky, that song actually place for you. But if you want to hear it again, even with the paid sites, you don't have that option. None of the "you might like this" music offered is anything I want to hear.
The feature that most annoyed the crap out of me with the iHeartRadio app was the limited number of skips within a 24-hour period. It wasn't even an option to pay for a subscription with access that had unlimited skips. If I don't want to hear the damn song you're recommending, I don't want to hear it, and nothing is going to make me listen to it. So fuck I heart media and their fucking limited skip policy.
So I can instead stream new music or download music I've already paid for with an Apple Music subscription and listen to whatever I want to hear, in the order I choose, whenever I feel like listening to music. I could also do this for free, without paying for an Apple music subscription, but I do find it worth paying for, especially at the half-price discounted student rate.
A pop musician named Melissa Manchester talked about this once in an interview. When her first record label signed her as a young artist, she said the expectation was that the first two or three albums might really suck, but that you would grow and mature as a performer, and then eventually you might have a hit record. Nobody expected perfection and a top-40 hit the first time around. She said that today, things are so different, and artists aren't really given the time to develop their talent. Either you produce hits immediately or you're out the door.