Can someone school me on what happened to the music industry?

I just read this article about the state of compact disc sales: New RIAA Numbers Show That CDs Are All But Dead And Downloads Are On Life Support

From the article "CDs brought in only $130 million during the first half of this year".

The numbers for other means of acquiring music like paid downloads are not much better. Also from the article "Downloaded albums and singles are down to $330 million for the first half of 2020; that’s 23% less than last year."

On the surface it seems impossible that the music industry could collapse like this. These are spectacularly bad numbers. What on Earth is going on?

 

spotify.com

 

Music is now television — who owns physical copies or downloads purchased TV shows? It’s broadcast or streamed. That’s what has happened.

Music itself is the same as it ever was.

 

It all can be traced back to that thing your typing on ?...........uh............yeah

 

It's the customers that have changed the most, not the industry.

 

Give something for free and it becomes worthless.

 

Oh, wait. That was in the seventies.

 

Naively, one might assume there are legions of people who don't want to be piped into the Machine, people who still want a physical medium like CD's that they can move from place to place, see touch, and feel, that they can read liner notes from. I can understand change, maybe even a fair bit of change, but the numbers of people who appreciate the tangible attributes of CD's appear to have fallen by a rate that is truly astonishing.

 

Video games.

 

Yes, that would be because it was really only two generations of people who appreciated it and we are all stocked up on what we want, and we don't appreciate the new stuff enough to buy it. Oh and we are all dying.

 

Maybe for the majority of the people buying music... it was about the music and not the container.

I personally like to read, but I don't like books. I will gladly read whatever on my iPad or my phone. I like CDs (and have a lot of them) but if I listen to music, I am usually listening on my phone.

 

Renting music is a nice payday for the landlords, so to speak.

 

The music industry hasn't collapsed, the physical goods portion of the industry has collapsed. In its place is streaming which makes up over 85% of total industry revenues.

RIAA - 2020 Mid Year Report
https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Mid-Year-2020-RIAA-Revenue-Statistics.pdf

In the first half of 2020, U.S. recorded music revenues grew 5.6% to $5.7 billion at retail value, continuing the positive growth trends of recent years. Streaming music grew to 85% of the market by value, compared with 80% the prior year. At wholesale value, revenues grew 5.1% to $3.7 billion. There were differences in trends between Q1 and Q2 of 2020, as retail store closures, tour cancellations, and other impacts of Covid-19 affected the music industry in many significant ways.

 

The kids want it on their phone, only.

Physical is becoming an audiophile niche.

 

Forget about all the formats. Forget the RIAA. People listened to Louis Armstrong on 78’s and giant wooden radios. Then on jukeboxes, 33 rpm LP’s, cassettes, CD’s, downloads, satellite radio...now streaming. Formats come and go. Distribution platforms come & go. Retailers come and go. Labels come and go. The art is the only thing that transcends all that b*ll****.

 

It'll be the music industry hanging onto its IP rights and misunderstanding the customer base.

Most people want to listen to music, but not necessarily 'own' it. There's a market for physical ownership sure, but the bulk of music consumption has always been via some form of streaming since music radio started.

That and....

 

Art that for the first time makes the artists nothing.

Some great evolution, huh?

 

You have been living under a rock, if the collapse of physical media sales is news to you. It has been going downhill fast for a long time: this year CD sales will be 2% of its best year's numbers. We have forum members still proclaiming that CDs and physical media is not dead. Technically it's not dead, but being 2% of your former self is kinda like being in a coma on life support.

Paid downloads are also declining. The real growth is in ad-supported streaming, which now accounts for more revenue than from digital downloads or from physical media sales. They recorded industry is holding just steady, but streaming as a whole is now 85% of the recorded music market value.

Thirty years ago, your media players at home were a stereo, an AM/FM radio, and a TV that picked up network channels over antenna. Nowadays, with the Internet, you consume media completely differently. Similarly, thirty years ago, you probably got a paper newspaper delivered to you every morning. Nowadays, with the Internet or even cable TV, you consume news completely differently. None of this means people are less interested in music or the news than thirty years ago, but the way it is consumed has completely changed. Whether the music industry can follow these changes is the real question, not how formats that are 20 or 10 years past their heyday ago are doing.

 

"Can someone school me on what happened to the music industry?"

(1) It didn't adapt to changing technology and changing culture well enough; part of the problem there is that the industry started thinking it could "legislate (basically via penalizing various things) its way out of cultural changes"--ideas like blank tape taxes, taking downloading consumers to court, etc.--instead of creatively adapting to keep itself proactively ahead of the game
(2) It became too bottom-line oriented, too focused on business statistics, in a way that wound up shooting itself in the foot (somewhat similar to the over-reliance on Sabermetrics in baseball)

Both of those changes actually started in the 70s. By the 80s things were already starting to get much worse. Plenty of musicians have talked about this stuff over the years. Zappa, for example, noted that in the old days (the 50s, 60s, etc.), the suits were "cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product and said, ‘What is this? I don’t know. Who knows what it is? Record it, stick it out. If it sells, alright!'" Then once the MBAs, etc. started taking over and focusing on statistics, analysis charts, etc. (Zappa said "The hippies [who had gone off to business school, etc.] are more conservative than the conservative 'old guys' ever were"), the business became much more conservative in a manner that actually resulted in it being more difficult to find and develop successful long-term artists. That carried over to the industry failing to deal with technological and cultural changes well. When you're only focused on having a good quarter you can easily lose sight of moves you might have to make for long-term success.

Basically, the way to stay in business isn't to have a single good, successful idea which you then try to ENFORCE everyone to stick with perpetually as if time were frozen. The way to stay in business is to KEEP having good ideas that adjust to cultural norms as they evolve.

 

For my taste,not many great album to buy this years so far, untill last week with AC\DC and C.Stapleton. Maybe it is a little part of the problem.

 

$$$$$ - pathways arrived that allowed people to pirate music and pay not a penny for anything they wanted, you'll never guess what happened next!!

talent and innovation - the introduction of the CD back in the mid80s meant that it was far far more expensive to produce music, so chances were not going to be taken on a music act as it would have been taken from 1955 to the beginning of CDs.

 

Bezos, Spotify and an assortment of internet pirates.

We lived through a golden age in music, it's now finished.

 

IDK, as I think ‘In Rainbows’ is one of Radiohead’s Best Albums, and I got it for Free.

 

Worthless ie no worth for the band and anyone involved in expending time and energy in actually delivering the product.

 

You may not like the answer, but that is the answer to your question.

See also: home video