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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 Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @09:30AM
Disclaimer: I'm not full pro. I can't afford to devote my life to it (yet). But it does bring in money, I have a lawyer and standard contracts and so on. Call me ... pro-am?
I don't have a big label contract, and I probably wouldn't sign one if it were offered. But it probably wouldn't be, because what I do is a little niche. I'm no Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga or whoever's hot this week.
For me, albums (self-finished, self-mastered, self-published) are frankly a loss leader. I don't lose a huge amount of money on them, but if you're polite I'll probably give you one for free, and sign it as well. Yes, every album you buy at a show is money in my pocket, but honestly in this day and age physical album sales are dwarfed by door money at shows.
And yet (granted, this is my situation, not true for everyone) live shows are not as lucrative as commissions. Specifically, movies and games. I know, indie games programmers can easily scare up a bedroom producer with dozens or hundreds of libraries and plugins at their command, but if you want musical flexibility, knowledge and depth you pay someone.
And this brings me to Bandcamp. Yes, I have a bandcamp account. No, it brings me in an amount of money that would barely motivate a hobo to cross the street. What it really is, is a conveniently accessible EPK (Electronic Press Kit). I mean, sure, if people wanted to spend money on it I guess they could, but a tiny minority of fans will do that compared to people who'd like to listen once or twice to half a track or three and move on. But I can send the URL to anyone and they can scan my sounds and figure out that they'd like to give me fistfuls of cash for custom music.
Just one musician's experience, but the real lesson is that by working out what value I can produce for my patrons (because sure, they're clients and stuff, but pragmatically they are also my patrons), I can find ways of doing things that they want, and for which they'll pay money. Keep your eyes and ears open out there.