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Musicians don't usually get a lot of money. The go-to scapegoat remains copyright infringement or piracy as the industry tries to call it. However, that is contradicted by the reality that music industry revenues have been rising for years. The percentage reaching musicians being always small turns out to be due to mostly unnecessary middlemen. TechDirt has done analyses before and now that the data is in for 2017 it shows that only 12% of music revenue collected currently reaches the actual musicians.
Now we have even more data on this. Citibank recently released a massive and incredibly thorough report on the entire music industry showing how and where the money is made. There's lots of interesting and useful information in the report, but the headline grabbing fact is that musicians end up with just about 12% of global music revenue. As I said, the report is incredibly thorough (and a really useful read if you want to get a sense of just how convoluted and complex the music business really is), but the key is that there was ~$43 billion spent on music in 2017. Approximately $25 billion of that went to everyone (outside of the labels) who helped make the music available: digital streaming services, retail stores, concert venues[.]
[...] That leaves $18.2 billion in money distributed out to the labels. But of that amount, only about $5 billion actually goes to artists, which means right around 12% goes to artists[.]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday August 29 2018, @08:19PM (2 children)
That's more or less what happened to some young fellows of my acquaintance.
They had a country rock type group, and thought they were pretty good, so they went off to the UK to make their fortunes.
They were signed to a british label who advanced them a bunch of money to record an album and tour it. The record company then decided their sound wasn't the latest thing anymore, withdrew support and they came home with a massive debt.
I think they were told if they could come up with £1 million for promotion the record company would help them.
Tough business.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday August 30 2018, @02:32PM (1 child)
One of my buddies was a front man for a metal band. They were good enough to build up a local following and were able to play a couple of festivals in Europe.
He made his living selling cars, though, and has basically quit trying to make it in the music business, because the money just isn't enough to make it worth the effort.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Thursday August 30 2018, @04:41PM
Pretty smart guy if he can figure that out instead of wasting his time chasing the dream.