WeeBey

BPI (the british music association) has reported that for the first time music streaming made up more than half of record label income (up 34.9% to 54%).

Most interesting is how bad the state of physical media is in the UK. Vinyl was up 3.7% but CDs were down 28.4%. Downloads were down 27.9%.

https://www.bpi.co.uk/news-analysis/...ion-streaming/

From the Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/business...d-label-income

Adam Tyner

Physical releases of games seem to be all but dead in the UK as well. The weekly charts are in a total freefall.

Josh-da-man

PhantomStranger

You are entirely correct about music listening habits but the music streaming services aren't profitable at their current monthly rates, or subsidized by companies like Google that can afford to lose money. Artists are also getting left out of the cold in the equation. The only ones making money from music streaming are the big three music labels - which license all the content to streaming services.

Watch as monthly streaming rates in music start rising in the next couple of years as the industry kills off CD and consumers have no other affordable options. Everyone in five years will be paying $30 a month for the current streaming services.

DJariya

I posted a thread in International Talk, but physical media is dying in Hong Kong. One of the biggest retailers HMV went out of business last December

https://forum.dvdtalk.com/internatio...-business.html

Apparently streaming has taken off over there. I was last in Hong Kong back in 2017 and there were very few physical media retailers. Mostly small shops. The big ones are all gone,

morriscroy

When I was younger, television content seemed like it was largely disposable. The only folks who cared, were the ones who would record and save every episode on vhs tapes. Basically a very hardcore crowd.

It seemed like the only time tv shows were more than just disposable pop culture, was during the dvd era. That is, until streaming became more convenient for tv shows.

slop101

With music streaming not being sustainable enough to, you know, actually pay for shit, what's gonna happen in the long term to people who actually need to earn a living doing this stuff, people like the musicians and songwriters who won't be able to rub two pennies together from streaming revenues?

BuckNaked2k

Tour.

DJariya

PhantomStranger

Basically, people under 25 just aren't purchasing music of any kind. They stream everything, often going with free options like YouTube. It's a disaster for musicians because the bulk of music consumers up until a few years ago were people in that age range.

Music labels are now laser-focused on licensing out music to television and movies - that is now a huge source of revenue.

Texan26

Musicians make a lot of money off YouTube as long as the views are coming from their official channels. Those ads before the videos bring in a lot of revenue.

big e

Regarding the music sales, my opinion for a while has always been, sales are going down because the music that has been popular since the late 90s (predominately pop) is music that has a short shelf life, doesn't age particularly well, and, ultimately, isn't very memorable. Josh-da-man called it "fashionable pop junk," although I would call it "manufactured pop junk," because I think a lot of it is being pushed by the music labels and not the singers/bands. The labels catch wind of a sound that's popular, they replicate it with newcomers and established artists, a new sound comes along, and the cycle starts over again. Occasionally, you will get a catchy tune that seems to last longer than the others, or an artist that knows what they're doing and can survive without being spoon-fed orders from the label, but those are the exception.

That sucks and all, but how is everyone streaming any different than everyone going to rental stores 25 years ago? I mean, these movie speciality stores seemed to do fine in the 90s, before everyone and their brother started buying DVDs. Were profit margins larger with VHS and Laserdisc, or something?

BobO'Link

Most artists on the major labels have never been able to make a living off just album sales. By the time all the accounting is done there's very little left. Albums and singles have always been little more than publicity to get people into concert seats. They make the majority of their money from touring, even the "big" acts, with additional coming from merchandising and licensing songs (TV, movies, and video games).

Generally an album will only make money if it sells more than ~500,000 copies. On average, only 20% of releases will hit that mark leaving 80% losing money. Considering most major label deals have the artist pay for everything out of the sale of the album the artist stands to lose money if sales aren't in that 20% group.

This article states musicians used to make their money selling albums. I'm guessing the author hasn't been around that long. I've been reading stories since the 60s about how the studios screw over the artists on recording deals and sales so much that many albums lose money - at least as far as the musicians are concerned. Granted, they use to make far more from album sales than today but it's *always* been touring that brings in the bulk of the money. Well... with the exception of "The Beatles" who've always been something of an anomaly in the music business.

rw2516

The real money is in song writing. A hit song is worth about $100,000 a year for life in royalties.

BobO'Link

Not so much writing it as owning the publishing rights. Just ask Paul McCartney how that works...

orangerunner

I just read that Microsoft's eBook store is closing and taking all of your purchases down with it. It sounds like they will refund your money but your collection is gone.
Interesting debate about digital ownership.

https://globalnews.ca/news/5130521/m...store-closing/

Alan Smithee

big e

There was a Microsoft eBook store?

Why So Blu?

Josh-da-man

PhantomStranger

Digital "purchases" aren't items you own - they are temporary licenses waiting to get yanked when a business decides it's not profitable anymore to support them.

I suspect the only thing that will end this practice is legislation by Congress, but Hollywood has enough clout to block any digital rights movement for consumers.

slop101

My digital MP3s beg to differ. The ones I got from amazon and iTunes are all safely tucked away on a thumb-drive, and many are burned to disc. And (unless I get disc rot, or the drives go bad), I'll still have the digital purchases is amazon or apple to out of business - which is actually far less likely than my drive going bad.

Alan Smithee

rbrown498

Back in the VHS days, all tapes except for the big, big blockbusters (think Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Back to the Future, etc.) generally carried a suggested retail price of anywhere between $60 and $80 dollars--each. So when a video store wanted to stock a few copies of a moderate hit like The Monster Squad, which had a retail price of $80, they'd pay roughly $57 per tape. If a tape had already been out for a while (around a year), the price would come down drastically, usually to somewhere between $15 and $30. When it hit that price point, it was considered sell-through, and it would wind up in places like Suncoast and Walmart. The truly big releases like in the first sentence above came out initially at that price, because the studios knew that they'd sell a lot more copies if they priced a movie to own right off the bat. You'd think that the video stores would like the lower prices, but they actually fought to keep the initial prices high, so that the majority of consumers had to rent the tapes instead of buy them. Video stores usually kept the majority of their no-longer-popular tapes until right before the sell-through prices took effect; they'd put the used tapes up for sale then, usually at or just below the sell-through price, to make back as much as they could of their initial cost. The video stores would price their used tapes at $10 or under usually only after the title had gone to the sell-through price, or if the tapes weren't renting and they needed to free up inventory space.

So it was a numbers game for most stores, because new releases drove business. Most mom-and-pop stores soon found out that they couldn't compete with the depth of big titles that the major chains had, so they slowly shuttered. Once only the major chains were left, they started doing deals with the studios directly that included lower prices for purchasing multiple titles and revenue-sharing.

But, to get back to your original question...yeah, the studios made out like bandits for the first ten-to-fifteen years or so of VHS's life. Pulling in $57 for the first year of a movie's video release for a VHS that cost them roughly $3 to manufacture? They may as well have been minting money.

tl;dr: Yes.

orangerunner

I recall the early days of the "Ma & Pa" video stores before the corporate giants took over and how quaint their business model was at the time. A hit movie like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" might have three copies available at the local store. You either had to reserve the title for which there was usually a two-week waiting list or if the store didn't take reservations, you just had to time it right that someone was returning the title you wanted.

When you rented a hit title within the first couple of weeks of release, that was bragging rights among your friends. It was something you really had to work hard at or luck-out on.

I guess DVDs have real sense of value to me because I remember those days so well. Renting a new release was difficult and unless you were willing to plunk down $100 (equivalent to five months of allowance at $5/week), owning a pre-recorded tape was completely out-of-the-question.

Now everything is plentiful and just seen as disposable pieces of amusement.