To pose the question, “are streaming services good for the music industry?” you have to look at the stance of the music industry. It can’t be taken entirely from perspective of the consumer. Myself being a consumer of music, a poor one at that, I’d take the opposite perspective of what I’m about to state. I do not think streaming services are good for the music industry… but I do think it’s a start! If you look at the music industry as a whole across the world, it’s been on a large decline in the past 14 years or so. It’s gone from a 40 billion dollar industry to just 16 billion. Record sales are generally on a decline due to piracy and other easy access methods of obtaining music freely. As record companies fold and merge, a new method brought
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They negotiate contracts without labels and artists who may have a bigger pull and can get a bigger share for their plays over anyone less popular. Spotify announced they paid out $500 million in royalties from 2008 to 2012. They’ve since said they’ve doubled their userbase, but it remains to be seen fair and viable for artists in a 16 billion dollar per year industry. But Spotify is still ancillary overall. As an artist, you can’t go straight from nothing to Spotify. You have to have some sort of distributor beforehand, such as iTunes to have a catalog accessible by Spotify. If more users came about it like a cable subscription service and just automatically paid for it like they would a sports or movie package, say in addition to their internet service, and if the royalty payments were shared equally over all of the artists and companies, it actually might start to be a way to make real …show more content…
It’s the age of likes and views, where Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube are the main drawing potential for record labels. Less risks are being taken as record labels try to consistently break even and if you have the existing following, well the companies only see your current audience. So you have to build yourself and tour and sell what you can and not rely on streaming services to pay the bills until it’s matured into a better system or until the music industry entirely crashes and
They negotiate contracts without labels and artists who may have a bigger pull and can get a bigger share for their plays over anyone less popular. Spotify announced they paid out $500 million in royalties from 2008 to 2012. They’ve since said they’ve doubled their userbase, but it remains to be seen fair and viable for artists in a 16 billion dollar per year industry. But Spotify is still ancillary overall. As an artist, you can’t go straight from nothing to Spotify. You have to have some sort of distributor beforehand, such as iTunes to have a catalog accessible by Spotify. If more users came about it like a cable subscription service and just automatically paid for it like they would a sports or movie package, say in addition to their internet service, and if the royalty payments were shared equally over all of the artists and companies, it actually might start to be a way to make real …show more content…
It’s the age of likes and views, where Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube are the main drawing potential for record labels. Less risks are being taken as record labels try to consistently break even and if you have the existing following, well the companies only see your current audience. So you have to build yourself and tour and sell what you can and not rely on streaming services to pay the bills until it’s matured into a better system or until the music industry entirely crashes and