The problems we have with the streaming model are rooted in our past behavior. Our beloved habits are subject to change, which is not only seen in a positive light. That’s understandable if it wasn’t your own idea to change it that way.
A passionate collector with increasing age is no longer able to appreciate his treasures. We can look at a lot of things, keep them clean as usual, but later as retirees we can’t put everything on the turntable again. We look back happily decades and do not want to repeat only old. We also need new things!
Many have therefore decided to digitize or to purchase CDs. So everything that was already successful on the market in vinyl was sold again digitally. Who likes to buy an album three times? With the later download therefore the single sales to the iPod dominated. It was only the particularly beloved singles that reached new electronic devices.
With the expansion of the network, digitization led to illegal usage strategies in file-sharing networks. At their peak, up to 80 million people were active there. By comparison, Apple alone had built up a functioning market with 800 million customer accounts just a few years later. This succeeded because many found digitization too much of a hassle for the emerging mobile players. 90% filled their iPod legally when there was something to buy. Steve Jobs fought paid streaming, which was already emerging at the turn of the millennium, with all means. Like illegal streaming, this behavior was sanctioned by the courts and destroyed a healthy market development.
Vinyl and CDs had provided for the paying masses. However, it is and always was only about 10% of humanity that spent at least €10 or $ monthly on this hobby. The market strategists who sell or rent us music know this. Today we find significantly more customers with more than one subscription, than in the past buyers with two identical LPs or CDs.
This spending took place first with vinyl, then with CDs, and finally as downloads. More than three times this business could not be organized with most buyers despite new recordings and samplers and it shrank very fast not only because of illegal downloads.
A very small but active group of buyers mainly wanted better quality already known but newly presented music primarily in old styles. The monthly trip to the concert was part of the rhythm of life before Corona and Brexit. Today, it is not only British artists in Europe’s creative industries who suffer from this lack of business. Free world art is more successful and marketable to a greater degree.
The daily and ordinary tootling in the background or with small earplugs slowly lost the mass market. For many, what came out of the inexpensive (car) radio was enough. For the vast majority, it was still: Subscription no thanks!
Popular music became a concert business and suffers from the corona crisis and foreclosure. To ensure that the billion-dollar business can continue to flourish in the future, a fourth pillar of distribution was invented, and not only in the music industry. We no longer own anything, but pay for consumption. Those who cultivate ownership as nerds continue to find their old offers and Roon perfects the connecting lines with an additional business idea in the niche, for which we pay another €10 and prefer to integrate both or even more services. However, only minorities ever make the billion-dollar business and the aging buyers with large collections of their own are slowly dying out. In fact, this is also far too rare to ever create a broad market. The artists would then have even less in total.
With 8 billion people, even today we find only about 1 billion people regularly streaming monthly. Half of them are only advertising-based without a subscription. For a fee, there are also thousands of songs available offline and on mobile. That’s the trick. You still can’t listen to everything, but the illusion lives and it tempts you to subscribe. The crucial market for music creators has been transformed from a buyer’s market to a billion-dollar tenant and concert market. The niche practically worthless in the overall view of the market players. Instead of buying the 20 million songs from 2 million artists, funds are focusing on the 800 artists, paying triple-digit millions in individual cases to keep profits from skyrocketing.
Streaming has made the market rich, not broken, but the distribution is not right!
Artist collectives have not yet managed to build platforms themselves. Tidal has passed on to the next billionaire. Will MQA bring the breakthrough? Certainly not, niche as ever.
In the tenant market, Spotify has achieved market leadership by purchasing technology, and the competitors are looking for strategies to improve their market position. Cannibalizing the very small high-priced niche seems like an act of desperation. Google is now growing faster with a different strategic focus and is looking for its place on the winner’s rostrum. That makes Apple and Amazon nervous.
The attempt to turn an even smaller group of artists into millionaires with exclusive deals has failed. The film people will also realize that. Money in the hundreds of millions per artist catalog is a waste. The small-scale payment in streaming more successful. The pie is only getting bigger through streaming. The demand of the artist majority for fair payment must be met even better.
When 1000 artists will soon be making millions and 10,000 artists $100,000 through Spotify alone, there is no other way around it. That’s where the market is. The niche is ancillary business, where a few cents can turn into a few hundred under lucky circumstances through specialty services. Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Qobuz or Idagio are even less able to pay 1.8 million artists so that all have a sufficient income.
Of course, Apple, Google, Amazon or Spotify have looked at these small companies and checked whether there is “business” in them. But the interest is more in technology. The mass of artists is lost on any platform and, unfortunately, we don’t really care. Just two or three dozen bandcamp profiles in the Roon niche says it all! Look at the number of your artists and you can judge what never reached your ears.
We can’t, won’t and won’t build our own libraries with 2 million artists.
Every artist just has to pay attention to his strengths and weaknesses and choose the platform that will not make the artistic hobby too expensive. Without a platform, things will only get worse. The size of the platform and the market power is one of the deciding factors for visibility. The majority have decided to just be everywhere and that seems to me to be smarter from an economic point of view. This is exactly the path Taylor Swift took. It was smart to make a lot of noise beforehand, because you want to be seen and heard.
There are also artists who only play live and sell recordings or memory sticks at concerts. But this can only be done successfully with fellow artists in the local loyal fan base.
Yes this amount of time, money , logistics, emotions, blood, sweat and tears, etc. … Is important, but success and payment is not guaranteed. The high quality production requires a large professional team that extends into the marketing of the major streaming services. Contacts with film and television are essential for survival. If you don’t want all that, you still have your beloved art, which is only shown privately or even publicly. If there are customers for it, platforms will help rather than hurt in marketing.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)