Huh, viewing the graph "adjusted for inflation" this seems to suggest to me streaming has solved the crisis of making money for artists? It seems like there's a sharp jump for the 20s and it's reaching 70s highs again.
Nope. Streaming cannibalized recording sales, where artists got more of that revenue. Payouts for artists on streaming are fractional and arguably opaque than per recording sales (most of the problems of record company contracts & accounting and then a few more to boot). They don't take home the revenue you're seeing here.
We had a missed opportunity to let digital recording retail replace media sales, the Bandcamp model could have been bigger. Spotify moved fast and broke a lot of things and did more goddamned damage to the sector than "piracy" by adopting the fundamental business model with a bit of convenience and veneer of legitimacy.
Yeah. One striking conclusion from the data is that MP3 sales never really took off in an appreciable way and only for a short period. Some of that is perhaps obscured by "Buy the CD and rip" but, given the decline in CD sales, not really.
An analyst friend of mine once said that the Napster win was about convenience, not cost. I was skeptical at the time but there's some evidence of that.
> Spotify moved fast and broke a lot of things and did more goddamned damage to the sector than "piracy" by adopting the fundamental business model with a bit of convenience and veneer of legitimacy.
For broadcast radio, songwriters received royalties and record companies got nothing.
This changed for satellite and internet radio, and I don't think Spotify is to blame.
The changes for satellite and internet radio had their own problems that I do think should be addressed, but you're right, that's not Spotify's fault.
But Spotify bears the brunt of the responsibility for building a product that was on-demand recording buffet that essentially exists to replace recording collections while yielding broadcast-order payouts rather than being an honest broadcast product.
1. That graph shows adjusted revenues lower than the 90s and early 2000s and even one or two years in the 70s.
2. It’s not a chart of what artists take home, but rather raw top line revenue, and it seems clear from all available evidence that the economics of Spotify et al are significantly worse for artists than they were with CDs. People have accepted this because it seemed better than piracy where revenue is zero.
I believe it's extremely lopsided. The top artists take up a lion's share of the revenue while smaller artists make much much lower than what they used to make in sales. Smaller artists mostly use the streaming platforms for publicity and then make most of their money from their performances.
I can see how at any particular year the revenue from each source is represented by its color in the vertical slice, but what is the significance of the baseline going up and down over time?
The vertical is total revenue for the year, centered around the axis. More emotional than a flat bottom edge, less info, less wasted space on the page.
The bands appear to be stacked older-format-lower.
It’s visually interesting, but without a vertical scale I’m immediately suspicious.
Mostly correct. Radio, satellite, and internet all pay different kinds of royalties at different levels (or used to, last I checked). I believe radio only pays the songwriters/publishers, whereas [streamer] might’ve also paid the performers.
This is also different than how individual companies - say Spotify - pay for content via direct deals.
I’m also confused because Pandora is ad-supported and generated ~1B per year, but the numbers here are low. But that may be captured in some other metric.
I was always a vinyl guy. At least up into the late 90's, when digital sound engineering started to become on par with analog. At least for my taste.
I will never forgive myself, that I didn't buy tons and tons of vinyl at the end of the 80's, early 90's, when they could be had for cents/piece. Admittedly I was a very poor student back then, but I should have spent less money on party and more money on vinyl.
In the DIY scene (hardcore, punk, metal, etc.) vinyl was a very popular format for independent bands because it was cheap and accessible (both for the bands, their small labels if they even had one, and the fans), but I think obscurity and doing the opposite of what the mainstream is doing were significant factors as well. I used to have an absolute shitload of 7”, EPs, and LPs from random bands all over the world but I got rid of them because a good amount of it I didn’t listen to anymore, and I just didn’t have the space for a record collection. Some of those records that I got for next to nothing are outrageously expensive now in the aftermarket. With the vinyl revival that’s been happening for a few years, oddly enough some bands are going to cassette tapes for similar reasons as the old vinyl days.
I’m looking forward to the 8 track revival and the wax cylinder revival.
overall span is the total revenue, the individual colours within are the share of each format. normally a graph like that would be fine but they mirrored it across the x axis because someone in the chain don't care about the data really they just want the appearance of statistics. that sort of mirrored plot is gaining traction is some science fields too and some people hate it, look up "violin plot"
Positive money is up on the y axis