When Vivendi SA took over Universal Music Group in 2000, the industry was riding high on bumper sales of CDs, though the investment soon soured as illegal downloads surged. CD revenue plunged by two-thirds over the next decade, and by the early 2010s, unloading Universal would’ve been a tough sell; who would pay a premium for a company whose main product—pop songs—was widely available for free? But today, Vivendi is considering the sale of a stake in Universal that could value the label at more than $25 billion.
...
The rebound can be traced to the same boogeyman that almost killed the business in the first place: the internet. These days, music fans have largely shifted from illegal downloads to paid streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Prime, and Pandora, which generally charge $5 to $10 a month for unlimited access to millions of songs.
Have record labels, like zombies, really returned from the dead?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 06 2019, @09:32PM (5 children)
Labels lost the monopoly on the music distribution/promotion.
Don't know about TicketMaster chokehold on concert venues, though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 06 2019, @10:43PM (4 children)
My sons band opened for Pantera, toured the states, CD's... not even $0.02 from the record label nazis. They switched to YouTube.
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday February 06 2019, @10:51PM (3 children)
Standard practice is you make fuck-all by selling CDs as an artist. You get an advance that may or may not be paid back by CD sales. If you blew your advance and want to be other than broke and famous, you have to tour your ass off.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:51AM (2 children)
That's standard practice for (c)rap music where they flood the market and fudge numbers, it's not what real artists do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:59AM
Forgot to add... Also nominated for best music video at Cannes, among others. But... MTV is more interested in crap music.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:12PM
No, that's standard practice for anyone who doesn't publish under their own label.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by FatPhil on Wednesday February 06 2019, @09:35PM (7 children)
So it might be sunny for Evilmegacorp, but it is still as bad as it's always been for the musicians. That's not a good thing.
Support your local, and visiting, bands, see them play at local venues, drink enough to keep the venue happy to have them again, and *buy merch*. And if you see a band member in a pub - tell him how much you liked the gig and buy him a beer, band members are *always* thirsty, I think it's an inherited trait.
(Disclaimer: I think about half of the people I know in town are musicians, I might be biased.)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 06 2019, @09:46PM
Musicians making money are socialist. Their alcohol quota should be assigned by state capitalists, and sharing should be banned.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday February 06 2019, @09:57PM
As a working musician: Yes, up to a point. What I'm mostly doing before and between sets is recovering enough to play the next set, and I also know for a fact that if I want to give my best performance I'm going to need to enjoy beer *after* rather than *before* or *during* the set.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Informative) by rigrig on Wednesday February 06 2019, @10:11PM (2 children)
I prefer to buy my music from Bandcamp [bandcamp.com], they pay out a decent rate to artists, while I still get to avoid the hassle of dealing with plastic discs.
(A most annoying experience I've recently had was when a band was not online, so I bought a physical CD at their concert... and couldn't get my computer to read it. So I had to go find a torrent...)
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday February 06 2019, @10:14PM
You should have complained to them. The least they should do is send you a replacement CD (and know that their fans can't play/rip their music on their computer).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 06 2019, @10:51PM
Best thing about bandcamp for me is that I can find music I'm actually interested in. The megacorps aren't putting out any 80s style synthpop instrumental music these days, but there's lots of it on bandcamp.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Wednesday February 06 2019, @10:12PM (1 child)
How about buying/streaming via Bandcamp instead? They give the artists a much bigger cut.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 06 2019, @10:21PM
I wish they didn't show Google captcha on login, though…
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday February 06 2019, @10:39PM (1 child)
The record labels don't understand the business they are in.
Everyone who ever dialled up to the net on their 56k modem to look for mp3's to download has always known that the music labels could have made an absolute killing if they had just offered their customers what they wanted at a reasonable price, but they never have. Instead Limewire and it's ilk gave people what they wanted for free. Instead of buying Limewire and turning it into a pay-for service, they ran around screaming with their hair on fire.
The Bloomberg piece says:
However, as long as the labels own the artists, they will own the content, and the streaming services will just have to pay up.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:21AM
They have no interest in the being a system in place to quickly and definitively show who owns the copyright for content.
People are ignorant. If they knew and could see what has been done they would be horrified.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday February 07 2019, @06:07AM
I finally clued in to that all the false negatives are due to SQL query timeouts
Rather use either tags or DDG with site-specific site:example.org queries.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday February 07 2019, @06:10AM (2 children)
Buy from the unsigned ones at http://www.cdbaby.com/ [cdbaby.com]
Even my album is there
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by coolgopher on Thursday February 07 2019, @06:18AM (1 child)
Slashvertisements go on the green site, buddy, not here ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @05:05PM
He's just setting up his long tail revenue stream like creimer!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:19AM
VHS killed and totally destroyed cinema. And TV.
When will they learn that people will pay a reasonable amount for content?
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:55PM
... Because 95%+ of people don't want to explore and discover new artists by browsing themselves. They don't want to suffer through 95% bad performances (or the 5-10% of that 90% decent performance of music the listener doesn't like) to find the ones that are worthy of being listened to (and again). Give me a radio station that plays a lot of music I'm familiar with and slips in new stuff that a label and the station think I'd like to hear, that's how I'll find the few new songs every year I want to have in my permanent collection.
Labels perform three basic functions:
1) They're a winnowing, a sort of audition. I don't need to have America's Got Talent audition several thousand acts, I just need a label with a decent A&R department.
2) They advance money to artists to deliver work that may or may not be successful, and they make their business by being an economy of scale (support 95 bad artists to get 5 that make all that money back and then some). One can bemoan how much of a cut they get, but one never had to deal with them in the first place, even when they seemed like the only game in town.
3) Technical services for production with experienced people with track records. Yes, anyone can buy the software and produce their own album. "Anyone" does not necessarily have insight about how to bring the best sound out of a band using that software. And further a sound that is still the band but likely to be popular. Of course there are exceptions. But talented backline people can in fact be helpful.
Corollary: Record labels aren't there to make an artist money. Never have been and it's a lottery fantasy for an artist to believe otherwise. ("Gee, if I only get a contract then I'll be set!") They are there to get an artist exposure and to get an artist popular enough that he or she makes a living from touring, and to make money for the label by doing so.
Both me and my best friend used to make casette mixtapes off the radio. When I think of all the hours we wasted doing so.... of course we didn't have the money to buy the albums (the whole point of creating the mixtapes). When I got to the point of being able to afford them did I keep doing mixtapes? Of course not.
Omnibus: The record industry is a system that serves the consuming public, and the public will in fact pay for such services. Why that should have been surprising is what's surprising.
This sig for rent.