I’m not quite sure who it was that decided that music was supposed to be an insanely profitable business. Mick Jagger has pointed out that it really only made serious money from the start of the ’70s to the end of the ’90s, but somebody’s written in to the NME the week complaining about Spotify and how it doesn’t pay artists enough for song plays. Compared to what? Album sales? While it’s true that an artist is unlikely to earn anywhere near as much money from streaming as they are from album sales, this isn’t really a comparison that works.
When you go to the theatre you don’t buy a movie ticket because you like the film. You buy a ticket so that you can go in and see the film. Music works in pretty much the opposite way. You listen to it, and then only go and buy the album if you like it enough. If people don’t have a way of sampling the wares of an artist, of getting to like their work enough to buy it, then albums are not going to bring in as much money as they could, which is a far more significant economic problem that what percent of a penny is paid out per play on streaming ...
The music industry has changed in more ways than we could imagine. At first we started with artists just selling singles, then it transformed over to people buying albums, and forn then on iTunes started to sell songs for just cents. In the year 2005, Pandora was launched on the Internet and later they created a mobile app. Most of the artist’s music can be found on YouTube. Free downloads has affected this industry as well. The music industry has found many ways to let the fans listen to the music they love. Internet streaming radios like Pandora are having to pay artist for copyright reasons. The music industry had two significant changes in the 21st century: the physical albums have dropped but streaming music has increased, even though artist get little to nothing in return.
The Internet has cut into the music industry's profits. It reduced the demand for CDs, increased the interest in singles and let people decide whether they want to pay for the new Prince album. This alone could be offset if all of the people pirating music would go to their favorite artists' shows. However, the hard economy has rapidly cut into people's ability to spend on luxury items and concerts rank right up there with sports in terms of practicality.
In the past, singers made money through CDs and cassettes. These forms of media have been replaced with digital copies of albums and songs. Even this method of accessing music has begun to fade away with the replacement of streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, or Soundcloud. Artists’ music has also been used in advertisements. This can negatively affect the artist’s career. Music artists shouldn’t have their songs in advertising.
Spotify’s Time. (n.d.). Music Business Journal Berklee College of Music RSS. Retrieved May 21, 2014, from http://www.thembj.org/2014/05/spotifys-time/
An “analyst” was quoted in the case (in 2002) as saying that “people will pay for music on the Internet, eventually.” This person was skeptical of the willingness of consumers to pay for
...his since they make money for licensing the music for the streaming services. Labels are embracing the streaming services since this allows another way for making revenue in a not so strong music economy.
Spotify is one of the most popular streaming services. And since its breakthrough, access to music have never been easier – just type in the name of an artist or a song and press play. The advantage of it is that listeners gets to listen to their wanted music instantly and for free and artist gets paid royalties. But since spotify’s big breakthrough there has been big debates if free music streaming is going to kill the music industry or if it’s going to help it.
There are six key new market disruptions concerning the digital distribution of music: the creation of a new and broad customer base, the possibility of an annuity versus a per-unit revenue model, the gatekeeper advantage for a record company having proprietary access to a new digital distribution infrastructure, understanding of a technology that could be applied to other digital content, need for balance between physical and digital distribution strategies, the strategy the incumbent should adopt with respect to the evolving war over digital distribution standards. Was there a disruption or an evolution?
Consumers rely on their smartphones and laptops to listen to music on-demand. Although there are many music streaming companies, Spotify was one of the first to let consumers access millions of artist without buying individuals songs or albums. With Spotify, consumers pay for a premium subscription that allows access to every artist, album, and song within their library of
People pay low subscription fees to streaming services, and as a result of this, listeners can be exposed to new artists and help these artists become popular (“Music Industry”). New artists are exposed to more people as streaming services often increase the amount of artists that people listen to. While streaming services do result in more exposure for an artist, that’s where the benefits stop. One of the issues with streaming services is payment issues. "Public relations missteps in the early 2000s kept many musicians from speaking out about economic issues, artists and executives said... But the shift toward streaming in recent years has prompted many musicians to investigate the changes in the business and comment online (Sisario)." Artists are not being paid much for providing their music to streaming services, but these issues and artist protests are being ignored by executives of the services until a high-profile artist makes the wage disparity public. "Streaming services pay a lot less than downloads, with the artists receiving a fraction of a cent per play on the service. Newer artists could struggle with the level of payments offered by the services, opponents have argued (O’Brien).” Hardworking artists are not receiving as much money from streaming services as they did from people purchasing their albums. This
You kind of have to wonder if the downloading of mp3s really hurt the recording artists. When the artist makes a CD, they make relatively little money from it. Most of the millions that an artist makes is from merchandising and endorsements. Most of the money from CD sales goes to the record industries executives. In an article from Young Money, Meredith Corbin states that “the executives from the recording industry should change the way they operate by either lowering the price of CDs or taking a pay cut.
...uld emphasize the negative aspects of downloading music for free, research shows that the benefits will greatly conquer the drawbacks. By letting people download music for free, the artist will have a better chance to have his music out faster and have his music gain popularity quicker. The local bands can be heard by having free songs. Also, you’ll have your favorite song in the palm of your and. Now it’s up to the record labels and artist to not be greedy and let the music be free.
Spotify is on-demand streaming music player. After registration and downloading the desktop application user gains access to more than 20 million songs that are currently available on Spotify [1]. The main characteristic of Spotify’s streaming service is that it does not sell music, but it gives access to it. Streaming digital music is based on agreements with content owners - record labels, digital distributors, aggregators and publisher collecting societies, to whom Spotify pays out royalties [2]. Without these agreements there would be no music to stream. Basically, Spotify has an intermediary role as it distributes music content from right holders to listeners.
Production companies took a bold step forward by uploading their content online. People now are not obliged to buy a full album to listen to one song, for a minimal fee you can buy the track you want, the same goes for movies and electronic publications. The downloaded files though will be digitally protected so that only the person who downloads them can use them, and he can’t share them at home or with friends. Even with this step from production companies, a large portion of people who download music still do it for free. Moreover hackers came up with new ways to remove the digital copyrights so the same as before one downloads music and distributes them around.
Now let’s flash forward back to present day when all that doesn’t happen anymore. Instead of saving of our money and begging our parents to take us to the store to buy a newly released album, we simply get on our computer, go to a website and download the album for free. It doesn’t matter what website it is, whether it is Limewire, Frostwire, or Pirate Bay, people will be happy with their free album. There are still some kids to this day who enjoy going to the store and buying and listening to an album the old-fashioned way but we have to wonder how bad things will get as more and more people are getting equipped with the Internet and the use of downloading music. While the internet might be making life easier for all, the growing use of downloading music on the Internet is growing into a detrimental and illegal problem.