The thing that fascinates me about Spotify and other streaming services is that the people who weren't willing to fork out 15$ for a CD in the past are now willing to pay 10$ every month for... pretty much nothing at all, if you think about it?!
Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians)
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Re: Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians)
#52The thing that fascinates me about Spotify and other streaming services is that the people who weren't willing to fork out 15$ for a CD in the past are now willing to pay 10$ every month for... pretty much nothing at all, if you think about it?!
> pretty much nothing at all
Except for instant access to what is probably the biggest collection of music in the world. I don’t mean to be snarky but, have you ever used Spotify? It’s a godsend.
Re: Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians)
#53It's interesting how different types of music have thrived through the streaming economy. Hip hop is huge on Spotify, where it struggled for radio play and sales before because commercial radio is so conservative (in the sense of risk-averse). Then there's the whole Billie Eilish thing: huge on Spotify, almost no radio play at all. On the other hand, there are Billboard 100 artists who are more or less absent from th…
Spotify has had a severe and negative effect on musicians who make what I term 'peak experience music'. Amazing music, but not something you listen to every day. Say you listen once a month or even just a few times a year. Before: 2 listens = dealer price of a CD in UK = about £7.5 (on a good UK indie that's split 50/50 with the artist). Now: 2 listens = income from 2 streams on Spotify = about £0.0006 I'm thinking o…
If you care about an artist, buy things from them. Records, tee shirts, posters, concert tickets, etc. Streaming revenue is essentially a rounding error.
Re: Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians)
#54It seems to me like musicians have always been in a precarious relation to the economy, same as all other artists. The only difference is that for a brief time in the 20th century the average person was willing to spend money on music, unlike every other time in human history. Nothing will ever stop people from making music, and 99% of working musicians are making a meager living doing what they enjoy, just like alwa…
> Nothing will ever stop people from making music The funny thing is how true this statement is, and yet how often it's deployed as if that means nobody needs to further consider or negotiate the present economics. How would one establish the idea that average person wasn't willing to spend money on music before the 20th century? Because I'd expect as long as there's been instruments and money, there's been some form…
Before recorded music, there was sheet music. It was a big business with "superstar" composers like Scott Joplin. It was common for a middle class house to have a piano in the parlor.
And as I understand it, even before the recording era, there were predatory middlemen exploiting the sheet music composers.
Re: Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians)
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a bit of cherry picking going on choosing a year where Eminem and Jay-Z were at their peak. 2000 was probably one of the top three years in the last 20 or so for hip hop. Scheduling Eminem for radio play while he is arguably the biggest artist on the planet is not really going out on a limb.
I picked year 2000 because it was well before streaming. There were dedicated rap/hip-hop stations for well over a decade at point. > Scheduling Eminem for radio play while he is arguably the biggest artist on the planet is not really going out on a limb. I mean, you can't be the biggest artist on the planet without some level of main-stream support in the first place. To say that hip-hop became more popular due to s…
In 2017, hip hop surpassed rock to become the most popular genre, according to Nielsen, and crucially that was reflected in streaming rather than album sales:
> According to the report, R&B and hip-hop are now responsible for 25.1% of all music consumption in the U.S., while rock claims 23%.
> Looking at the rest of the numbers listed that dissect how people are consuming these styles of music, it’s clear that streaming is to thank for the swap in ranking. Rock is far and away the winner when it comes to album sales—the genre claims 40% of all album sales in the country—but the total number of records actually purchased dwindles every year, so while that percentage may remain steady or even climb, it’s not representative of how Americans are truly consuming music. [1]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2017/07/17/hip-hop...
[2] http://www.insideradio.com/free/in-a-streaming-world-it-s-r-...
Re: Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians)
#56I prefer to buy, not rent music. Luckily we have enough DRM-free music stores around that simply sell you music files. FLAC is the best option.
Like what stores?
Often on Bandcamp and GOG.
Some other stores that you can find DRM-free FLAC in:
* https://www.junodownload.com
Re: Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians)
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like what stores?
https://bandcamp.com/ is really wonderful if you're asking about music in general and not artists hitting the billboard charts. However, as it supports free listening there isn't a barrier to searching around and discovering new things. If you want some good coding music for the day I'd suggest starting with https://wanderband.bandcamp.com/
I love bandcamp. For 9 years now I've been getting almost all my music (I think maybe one or two albums from Amazon in-between) from them. I can get straightforward notifications, I can get whatever format I want and I can stream the whole album as much as I want before buying it (though I never listened to one fully before buying it – or deciding against it).
And not to forget that I can often choose my own price (when I was a student I sometimes paid less, nowadays I usually pay a bit more)
Re: Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Platforms like Spotify, YouTube, etc, are a marketing channel - not a revenue channel Which would be cool, if Spotify wasn't meant to be a replacement for a revenue channel.
You can't replace something that is dead.
Revenues from US digital recorded music sales steadily rose from the introduction of iTunes up into the billions through at least 2012. Maybe 2013/14-ish. I think at one point it'd actually matched 90s CD sales revenue, though I may not recall correctly.
That was hardly "dead." There's this narrative that goes around "oh, yeah, the internet happened, copies are cheap, no one was ever going to buy music again" ... and it's not true.
The truth is that there was a thriving digital recording sales growing up to take the place of physical recording sales. And buffet streaming kneecaped it.
Re: Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians)
#59It seems to me like musicians have always been in a precarious relation to the economy, same as all other artists. The only difference is that for a brief time in the 20th century the average person was willing to spend money on music, unlike every other time in human history. Nothing will ever stop people from making music, and 99% of working musicians are making a meager living doing what they enjoy, just like alwa…
This statement reflects wearing a certain kind of blinders, where you think the current pop-music industry is what the word "music" means.
I can assure you that people were spending plenty on going to operas in the 19th century, for instance. And in the 18th century. And of course world-class orchestras have been making money for a few centuries, as well.
Re: Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians)
#60I would argue that most musicians should be salaried employees making 80-150k. The label would then handle everything else. The musicians only need to focus on creation and performing. I have always been interested in the problem Spotify is trying to solve for. However, I think they've only solved half the problem. The other half of the problem is solved by putting long tail musicians on a salary and then they can gr…
The problem with this is that it requires really successful artists to work for far less than the value they create, which they won't – because they know they could make far more money independently.
And without the top performers subsidizing the salaries of everyone else, the whole thing falls apart.