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Streaming Services Generated More Than 50% of All US Music Industry Revenue in 2016 (variety.com)

Posted by msmash on from the disruption dept.

Janko Roettgers, reporting for Variety: Streaming music services were for the first time ever responsible for more than 50 percent of all U.S. music industry revenue in 2016, according to new numbers released by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) Thursday. Paid and ad-supported streaming together generated 51 percent of music revenue last year, to be precise, bringing in a total of $3.9 billion. In 2015, streaming music was responsible for 34 percent of the music industry's annual revenue. Much of that increase can be attributed to a strong growth of paid subscriptions to services like Spotify and Apple Music. Revenue from paid subscription plans more than doubled in 2016, bringing in $2.5 billion, with an average of 22.6 million U.S. consumers subscribing to streaming services last year. The year before, subscription services had an average of 10.8 million paying subscribers.

34 comments

  1. Not enough! by Daemonik · · Score: 2

    Music Industry CEO's claim that it's still not enough money to bathe in, demand more DMCA takedowns and strong arming foreign governments to change their laws, imprison their citizens on industry whims.

    1. Re:Not enough! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      They are loosing ONE BILLION a year with those pesky safe-habour laws after all:
      https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/17/03/30/1331228/safe-harbor-cost-the-us-music-industry-up-to-1b-in-lost-royalties-per-year-study-finds

    2. Re:Not enough! by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      They're losing a billion a year and they're not folding? Can't be doing that badly, then.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  2. Amazing... by Rakhar · · Score: 1

    Amazing how if you give people something worth paying for they're more likely to pay for it.

    It's almost like they screwed themselves out of more money by holding out on changing thier business model than piracy ever cost them...

    1. Re:Amazing... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Yep. If they could get their shit together and offer a single service with all music they could really do well. As it stands now, if you subscribe to one service and it doesn't have what you are looking for, you are not going to subscribe to a second or pay for singles / cd's. You are going to forgo the song, "steal" it, or find it on youtube. If it can't be obtained in one of these ways then the artist loses because he or she has no presence in the new music world.

    2. Re:Amazing... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I agree in principle, but streaming isn't all that great either - its massively cannibalizing straight album sales, and musicians receive a tiny fraction of the money

      http://www.spin.com/2016/07/2016-album-sales-data-billboard-nielsen-music-worst-year-since-last-year/

    3. Re: Amazing... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Artists already get a tiny share. How is that any different?

    4. Re:Amazing... by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      Now imagine what money they could rake in if they only manged to do this world wide instead of just the US market with "carefully selected options" available to the rest of would-be customers that are now pretty much required to find other ways to get their fix.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    5. Re:Amazing... by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      As if artists got a bigger share from CD sales.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  3. Artist cut by rijrunner · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Streaming is also one of the lowest percentages of revenue streams to reach the artist... The streaming company and any label take the vast majority of income.

    1. Re:Artist cut by Gr8Apes · · Score: 1

      The streaming company and any label take the vast majority of income.

      And that's different from any of the other revenue streams how?

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    2. Re:Artist cut by rijrunner · · Score: 3, Informative

      Average per-stream payout: $0.004891

      http://www.digitalmusicnews.co...

    3. Re:Artist cut by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There's a big difference in number of listeners per stream compared to other broadcast options. If a song has 30,000 streams, that typically means something less that 30,000 people heard the song (some people listen to a song more than once). Play a song in a restaurant, and several dozen people may hear that one 'stream'. Play it once on TV, and thousands or millions may hear that 1 'stream' of the song.

      In either case, artists receive very little of either royalty payment.

    4. Re:Artist cut by radarskiy · · Score: 1

      Hello, number without context! Are you large or small?

      Without knowing what other forms of listening pay out, we can't tell whether the streaming sources are villains or victims. Note that royalties are not paid to the artist but to the label; the label pays the artist. So just knowing that the artist is receiving less from streaming sources is not enough to tell you that streaming sources are getting a great deal.

    5. Re:Artist cut by rtb61 · · Score: 1

      Technically it is both the smallest and largest payout for the artist 'cough' 'cough' drunken drugged up minstrel (lets drop the music marketing bullshit, music geeks is the reality). It depends whether or not the music geek sells via a publisher or sells direct.

      Why the big hate on streaming and direct sales, the publishers are forced to compete with artists content they no longer own. The publishers want nothing but new artist content (new artists in the case being the best at BJs in limos), with by far the majority of income going to the publisher. Once a real artists breaks free, they compete against the publisher and their stable of one hit wonders who are better at BJs than they are a creating music.

      It is that competition the publishers hate because they can no longer sell the over hyped, over marketed, crap produced by the one hit wonders and the publishers lose all their profits. The real skilled music geeks of course can now self publish and do so for the rest of their lives free from the disgusting pawing lusts and smelly genitals of music publishers as well as their never ending greed.

      Some music geeks still ride delusionally high on the marketing like melonhead or mad madonna et al but most have settled back down to earth and a doing reasonably well direct publishing (which of course the publishers are fighting fang and claw).

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    6. Re:Artist cut by El_Muerte_TDS · · Score: 1

      Then those artists shouldn't have sold their copyrights to the label. They do not own that music anymore.

    7. Re:Artist cut by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      This is why more and more artists simply bypass the big studios and publish themselves, either really doing it themselves or hiring services that get them online to various streaming portals for pennies compared to studio rates.

      Face it, the "big five" are dinosaurs nobody needs anymore in this time and age. Even if you are a "real" band, i.e. playing instruments instead of creating everything inside a computer, there's plenty of great recording studios that will record your single for a few hundred bucks at quality, distribution is easy and painless now, too.

      Who needs the parasites anymore?

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  4. Who knew? by nightfire-unique · · Score: 1

    People want to pay a reasonable fee to access region-neutral content in a convenient fashion?

    Who knew?

    Hey, film industry......

    --
    A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
  5. That's it? by Solandri · · Score: 3, Interesting

    according to new numbers released by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) Thursday. Paid and ad-supported streaming together generated 51 percent of music revenue last year, to be precise, bringing in a total of $3.9 billion.

    So the RIAA's U.S. revenue for all of 2016 is just $3.9 billion / 0.51 = $7.65 billion? That's it? We're mandating DRM, incorporating it into playback media devices and transport layers, forcing ISPs and web services like YouTube to spend untold $millions to go on witch hunts and filter through the 57% of DMCA takedown requests which are fake, threatening people with loss of their Internet connection, bankruptcy, and jail time. All for less than $25 per capita, and what amounts to roundoff error for Google, Apple, and Microsoft's annual revenue?

    1. Re:That's it? by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 1

      one sixth of a wall

    2. Re:That's it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You guys are succeeding in killing off the music industry with YOUR greed, insisting on free access to all recorded music which was created and produced, in general terms, by the capitalist business model over the past century.

      Now you're complaining about the quality of pop music these days, how lame most of it is, it all sounds like singers babbling about what happened to them the other day with arrangements added by two guys wearing black t-shirts hunched over MacBooks. What goes around, comes around. What did you expect?

    3. Re: That's it? by thundercattt · · Score: 1

      That's ok. Majority of the new music is rubbish. Already got the classics at home.

    4. Re: That's it? by radarskiy · · Score: 1

      Majority of the old music was rubbish too

    5. Re: That's it? by desdinova+216 · · Score: 1

      90% of everything is crap

    6. Re:That's it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > You guys are succeeding in killing off the music industry

      That's my goal and has been for years. I'm saying that unironically, I take good care of what music I buy: never from a RIAA affiliated label.
      Since some storage media is taxed in my country, I buy it abroad.

      Unfortunately, it's not dead yet.

    7. Re:That's it? by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      Killing off the music industry may be the best thing that happened to music since the invention of the electric guitar.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    8. Re: That's it? by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      The majority of any music ever produced is rubbish. The music of the 60s only looks so much better in comparison to today's because, well, what do "oldies station" play? The good, or the rubbish?

      The 60s gave birth to a slew of really, really crappy music, created under the influence of heavy drugs that made the creator think it's gold when in fact it was even back then something you couldn't even listen to while you yourself were drugged out of your mind. It was simply and plainly absolute bullshit. And that's even only the music that got pressed on vinyl, while today every idiot with a computer can barf the results of him finding a cracked version of CuBase and some samples into YouTube.

      Every time, ever, had its good and its bad music. What you remember is the few gems that qualify as good music.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  6. Meanwhile CD sales plummet... by pubwvj · · Score: 2

    Meanwhile the music industry announces that CD sales have plummeted for the 17th straight year blaming the decreased sales on piracy.

    1. Re:Meanwhile CD sales plummet... by Proudrooster · · Score: 2

      I think this is because computers no longer come with CD players. If I can't rip a CD what good is it? Until CD readers make a comeback, CDs are doomed. I suspect the same type of shift is going on with BluRay sales as people stream videos from Netflix and Amazon and watch it NOW, instead of going through a bunch of dopey, unskippable menus, warnings, and previews. If I have a choice between physical media and streaming, I am streaming.

    2. Re:Meanwhile CD sales plummet... by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      Funny that you mention it.

      For the first time in maybe a decade or two, I was trying to buy a CD again. To use in my car, which is pretty much the only place anymore where I have a CD player. So I browsed and checked, and I learned that music CDs containing about 40 minutes of music cost between 15 and 20 bucks today.

      If you are really wondering why people don't buy this, take a wild guess.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    3. Re:Meanwhile CD sales plummet... by pubwvj · · Score: 1

      I wasn't wondering. That was commentary on how the industry miss-sees things.

  7. What we need by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ..is a united front of all the ISP's to shut down all streaming traffic of music sales. Force the RIAA to sell only on CD.

  8. free up the RedICE packs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    man, can someone send me a couple euro?
    halp your ol pal out I needs those hour 2's late at night.
    my ADD DRESS is a beautiful silk white gown with 2 + 2 = 4 where my perky tits usually stick out for sucking
    it has been said, FREE UP the REDICE and make it go away

    before you condemn me, just think, I Spurn the economy, I was going to PAY for my streaming Radio. I was working to generate the money before you so rudely condemned me. That admin that baned me probably pirates the sh, what the fuk do you even pay that bofh for? IN the end, the radio streaming will be around BECAUSE of ME, not you, cause I am paying for a product that I consider worth it, and not spending that which I don't have at the same time, Ben Franklin would be on MY fukin side.