Music Industry Rises While the Artists Fall: Trouble in Paradise?
The music industry continues to transform drastically as we move further and further into the digital era. Music streaming has utterly conquered traditional listening methods such as CD, vinyl records, and radio. Long gone are the days of downloading your favorite sounds from third-party websites and illegally pirating songs from your favorite artists. We have now entered the land vastly trounced by the fantastic four of streaming:
- Spotify
- Apple
- Soundcloud
- Tidal.
Though streaming allows more music to penetrate more households, this phenomenon has proven to come at the grave expense of the artist. Pay per stream is currently at excruciating prices getting as low as $.00318 with Spotify’s service. Meaning if an independent artist receives 1 million plays from 1 song, they will only accumulate around $3,000 overtime. This does not include the potential payouts for producers, songwriters, engineers, and managers that may each have a claim to the pie. For some, this may be enough to continue chasing the dream, but for other artists, this number may be extremely discouraging.
But at the same time, streaming has arguably saved the entire music industry. How???
Before the emergence of streaming, the music industry was steadily declining in revenue as piracy and YouTube became more prevalent. Pirating by music consumers meant consumers were gaining access to music for absolutely no cost. Labels and independent artists were inserting sizable investments into the development of tracks/albums/projects, but each of these projects was getting stolen right under their noses. People would be die-hard fans of artists without fully understanding that the same way they were able to enjoy those songs, was the same way they were taking money away from their beloved artists. But through Spotify’s innovative push for music streaming, the entire industry completed the full 180.
What does this mean for the industry now?
As of February 2020, the industry experienced record highs in revenues, engagement, and concert attendance as the combination of pocket-friendly accessible music and the rise of social media caused more music to be heard than ever before. While physical music sales approach extinction, revenue from music streaming has seemingly eradicated the negative impact of CD annihilation. The better news: music streaming looks to stay as Amazon, Spotify and Apple continue to see promising increases in subscribers. The sad news: Labels, label heads, and executives seem to be reaping most of the benefits of the boom, while the artist continues to be underpaid and undervalued. With the prevalence of YouTube education, this new generation of artists will only become more informed and more equipped to strike against the industry’s current setup. This certainly seems to be a major problem that must be solved to avoid trouble in paradise.