Quote:
Originally Posted by j.p.s
And of the little money that makes it back to content providers, even less makes it back to content creators. The content providers and platform providers are both middlemen.
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True.
The problem creators face varies by industry, though.
Movies and video are team efforts--screenwriters/producers/directors/actors, lyricist/composer/producer/performer--and most often the product is owned by a corporation of one kind or another. It can be a small partnership or it can be a giant foreign multinational and the actual creators can be owners of the company or the product or merely paid employees punching a time card.
Rarely do you a single person movie. Even indie movies are a team effort beholden to one company or another. Typically financiers or distributors, often both.
Music there has long been an alternative but mostly it was just an entry to the corporate side and only in the last couple of decades has it become viable to be fully independent for most or all of a career. A lot of the griping by musicians these days is that digital music (and streaming in particular) is a bulk and backlist business and (except for the biggest names) pays bulk rates. And with streaming eating up a lot of consumer music spending discrete sales are way down so creators are left with only performance as a major revenue stream. Which of course goes mostly to the performers. The rest of the team is getting shorted, compared to previous eras.
Music does stand alone in the depth of the hole it is sliding in.
Big big mess and streaming is only part of the problem. It is most definitely *not* part of the solution, revenue-wise.
The thing is, there really isn't much money in streaming. And what money there is is comparable to radio, not the traditional sales channels. So it pays radio-like royalties. And even then, streaming is a money losing venture because most of it already goes to the studios.
Spotify dreams of breakeven, Pandora is a regular loser, and Beats is the third rebranding of Microsoft's music efforts so its a safe bet it's barely treading water. AmazonMusic is new and comingled with PrimeMusic so its profitability is almost certainly marginal. Apple Music doesn't even need to make money.
Spotify is the biggest streaming service, right?
Here's its profitability:
http://fortune.com/2018/05/30/spotify-ipo-profit/
(Short version: zilch.)
To give the music industry the cash flow it grew accustomed to would require something like a $30-50 a month subscription and who would pay that?
The music industry's problem is they great fat dumb and lazy in the CD era. They not only replaced the $5-8 vinyl LPs with $12-15 CDs, they killed the $1-3 singles and the less profitable tape formats. Better yet, true fans of successful acts spent like crazy buying older content on CD. Money just rolled in.
Then digital rolled in.
CDs were easily ripped. And there always was a large market for used discs.
The industry was so happy milking the CD boom they ignored consumer irritation over the pricing...until it got Napsterized.
They were late in moving to digital but eventually after a lot of battles they managed to mitigate the losses.
The problem is, Digital sales exposed the unsustainable economics of the CD music album: a typical music might carry two or three hits, maximum. In the vinyl era that was about right because the album to single price ratio was about three to one anyway. If a fan found more than three songs they liked, even if they weren't all radio hits, getting the album made sense. The filler tracks were a bonus. If they didn't satisfy the loss was minor.
Once digital hit, though, paying $10-15 for an album that might at best have three great songs (if that) became riskier than paying $3 for the three known good songs. The album to single cost ratio of 10/15 made little economic sense. Historically, most musical acts to hit the national scene are one hit wonders. Here today, gone tomorrow, with the one catchy song as their legacy. (Many more didn't even get that.)
Digital singles brought the music industry economics back to the 60's and seventies.
And streaming brought it back to the 40's and 50's.
Check the chart here:
(Make sure to click adjusted for inflation.)
https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/
And that is only to the seventies.
I couldn't find sales data for earlier periods, but you can see the changing scale by looking at sales for the top annual sellers here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List..._United_States
Harry Belafonte's 1956 "Calypso" was the first LP record album to sell over one million copies. A few singles, including Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo-Choo," Bing Crosby's "White Christmas," and Tennessee Ernie Ford's "Sixteen Tons" had previously made it to a million but no album.
Ten years later, the top seller made it to 6 million.
In 1976, the top seller moved 8 million.
By 2017 the top seller, Ed Sheeran, moved 1.7 million physical copies plus another million in digital.
https://www.officialcharts.com/chart...-chart__21316/
It all comes down to the fact that music listening has reverted to the mixed-playlist model of radio, focusing more on specific songs than on album listening. More, lots of consumers are comfortable with the "free" ad-supported radio-like services from Spotify and Pandora. Spotify, for example, has more free users than paid subscribers.
https://www.macrumors.com/2018/11/01...d-subscribers/
This reckoning was a long time coming: lots of mistakes, over decades, are now piling up.
Just as with books, consumers have a lot more choices for their entertainment and are spreading it around on gaming, movies, sports bingeing TV series.
Music and books aren't the only games in town and for a whole lot of people neither is the top choice or even close to the top.
Neither griping nor government action will change that.