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posted by chromas on Wednesday August 29 2018, @03:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the musical-fares dept.

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[.]


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday August 29 2018, @10:25PM

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Wednesday August 29 2018, @10:25PM (#728040) Journal

    First, the introduction proper notes that in 2000 the amount of total artist revenue was 7%. Yes folks, what this report actually says is that artists are taking home MORE as a percentage of the industry than they did nearly 20 years ago.

    And artists were making their profits off of concerts for decades. There's nothing new about that.

    The record making business is the income which keeps the record makers alive. The ones who pay the artist for the months it takes to get into a studio and record an album, they do generate buzz for artists which they think can make it, and may front them money for a year or two to see if they'll be profitable. The ones who do that to dozens and dozens of artists and maybe one in twenty will pay back all that money out the door and then some. That whole process is not one intended to make artists money - it's intended to let them survive long enough to see if they get popular and actually get their tunes noticed by the public.

    You get that tune noticed by selling records, going to the top of Spotify or Amazon, get a lot of YouTube views. And maybe still by radio airplay. None of those are meant to make the artist any moeny, either.

    *Then* the artist has the popularity to command premium ticket prices at larger venues and get a share of that pie, and also the merchandise marketing. That's where an artist can make the money. (And the venues and promoters take a big chunk of it too.) And the artist keeps on making money, year after year, by touring. And artists can keep on touring long after their big five albums have ceased charting and the record company no longer makes heavy profit on their new material. Because people will keep paying to see them live.

    All those other players, from the "greedy record company executive" to the DJ who spins their tunes to the satellite engineers who keep the Sirius constellation up and transmitting, to the guy who owns the property where you play, they have to eat as well. And no, you can think that the world can do without them. If it could, it would.

    And no, most artists never make much. Because like being an airline pilot, a cop, or being an actor, EVERYONE wants to be a music star. No, not everyone. But more than enough people who have the talent want to do it. Supply and demand. Until you get famous you are utterly expendable and replaceable. So there is little economic pressure to supply the artist with more, and the artist doesn't have the power to demand more, until they prove that they can make others money as well with their talent.

    Music industry has overhead, film at 11. C'est la vie. At least they're getting more now than they did of the pie.

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