That's somewhat ridiculous if that is the reality. All of CD manufacturing, shipping, retail overhead is eliminated in streaming. In reality streaming should produce more money for talent, eliminate overhead, and put more pressure on recording companies profit margins.
The height of the CD was ludicrous. A CD cost 15-20$ in the mid nineties, and cassettes, a more expensive and complicated medium, were half of that.
So a lot of the collapse isn't EVIL PIRATES, it is that the industry was sitting on a massive monopoly and cash printing machine, and digital collapsed that profit margin.
Music production used to require million dollar+ recording studios that the labels had a semi-monopoly on. Even in the 1990s, you could get usable recording equipment and software from a PC and Microsoft Windows.
Radio payola is mostly the last gasp of label control, although that seems to be going strong.
The REAL killer of music revenue is the rise of video games and way more television/video accessibility. First of all, there isn't one TV in the home like it was up to the 1990s. TVs are cheap, and smartphones are ubiquitous. Video games. tiktoks/youtubes, and TV dominate the media of the youth, and music is a peripheral/decorative aspect of those.
Essentially music filled the world of bored teenagers once upon a time, but boredom has been destroyed in the modern world (replaced with media saturation ennui).
> Essentially music filled the world of bored teenagers once upon a time, but boredom has been destroyed in the modern world (replaced with media saturation ennui).
Interessanting hypothesis. Do people listen to music less nowadays? It seems indeed not as dominant as in the 90s, I admit that.
If you're watching insta/tictok you're probably not also listening to music at the same time. Also kids these days listen to a much wider range of music then I was ever subjected to. We got whatever local radio stations could be picked up, or if your family had a collection and let you touch it. Now my daughter can pretty much pull up anything made on YouTube and play it from classic instrumental to whatever was released yesterday.
Everyone on spotify is free to put their music on bandcamp for $10 instead, and I in fact have bought music exactly that way, getting high quality lossless audio from a niche artist that probably doesn't make a cent from spotify.
But artists largely don't take their music off spotify to exclusively sell alone, because if they tried that they wouldn't make a dime. Music is hard to "find" and your average music maker trying to go their own way (I know several) makes you zero dollars, so why not put it on spotify, make ten bucks, and also possibly find a fan who will buy your music on bandcamp for full price and essentially pay for your life.
The modern creator economy has largely shown that the way you be an artist and make a living is by giving away your stuff mostly for free, making good quality stuff, gaining fans, and letting a small percentage of those fans literally donate you an $80k salary. This works for game makers, music makers, book writers, video producers, journalists, etc.
I doubt it works for almost anyone. Who is making $80k in donations? More likely seems the following: People listen to music on Spotify and don't even begin to think about donating any money to the musician. They already pay for Spotify after all. And of course Bandcamp can't compete with Spotify pricing, let alone piracy.
Well, before spotify they made zero money from me and a lot of other people. Spotify also allowed a lot more people to publish their music. Increased supply and higher competition leads to lower prices.
1999 with its overpriced CDs is never coming back.
> Increased supply and higher competition leads to lower prices.
The "supply" of music, including music sold on CDs, is equally unlimited. What leads to the low Spotify price is that they have to compete with music piracy. CD prices weren't higher because CDs were expensive to manufacture and therefore limited in supply -- they weren't. Instead, they were more expensive because they didn't have to compete against piracy.
> they were more expensive because they didn't have to compete against piracy.
Bull. Any reasonably-sized town had at least one "dodgy" seller of pirated CDs.
CDs were expensive because they were fundamentally a vanity item, with sleeves and goodies. That empowered middlemen and official distribution chains which, in developed countries, is typically where profit accumulates. Artists themselves, under contract with labels, couldn't buy CDs at cost to sell at concerts - labels were pressured to protect the distribution chains.
You had more piracy during the CD era than anything you can imagine right now. Basically every town had a pirated CD shop, everybody knew somebody to call to get some pirated CDs, it was a full business.
By "increased supply" I meant - more artists were able to offer their music on the service. So each artist has a way bigger competition now. It was much harder to release a CD or get your songs on radio than get on spotify, bandcamp and youtube.
Yet many musicians could receive a living wage if just one executive gave up their corporate jet. Enough about that though... let's chide the 'entitled' consumer and supply and demand!
What you view as reasonable is so low that musicians hardly make any money from it.