Streaming accounts for more than half of music industry revenues
Monetizing music, and how you can do it
K-pop fans rally in favor of the BLM movement
BIG 3 + GLOBALIZATION:
Big 3:
In the music industry there are 3 major companies that dominate mainstream global distribution, they are collectively referred to as the Big 3 (or WUS), they are Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.
Due to the internet and the recent increase in globalisation, it has become easier than ever to distribute music to a global market. Due to convergence and web 2.0, in theory this would not only mean that now the consumer or the average person now has the means to distribute and create their own music videos, but can also compete with the big 3. This however does not seem to be the case.
Although the internet has made it possible for anyone to self-distribute their music, record sales are no longer a viable stream of income. So artists now more than ever rely on sales of merch, live shows and marketing/branding. Because of this the big 3 have been able to keep their stranglehold on the distribution of music. According to this article by "The Atlantic" which said that from 1982 to 2003 the top 1% of earners have doubled their income.
Graph taken form "The Atlantic" article
Here is a pie chart detailing the market shares of the big 3 and independent distributors from 2020 taken from statista.com:
Globalisation and technology has given these labels access to the best musicians, producers, music video directors and marketing managers across the globe. It is an undeniable fact that independent labels cannot compete with the financial incentives offered by the big 3.
Indie:
However the main alternatives to the Big 3 are the smaller indie lables. Usually these lables might handle the production of music (paying for studio time for example) and usually have a distribution deal with one of the big 3 for global distribution or access to platforms like Spotify.
For example the artist we have chosen for our coursework, Björk is signed to both one little independent records (OLI) as well as UMG (Universal Music Group). This could be because as previously mentioned OLI could be responsible for producing her records while UMG allows her global distribution. However it is more likely OLI is responsible for UK distribution of her records as they are the leading distributors in the UK and UMG is responsible for her US distribution as they have a strong foothold in that market.
INDUSTRY FORMAT SALES/REVENUES:
REVEBUE PEAK 1999:
Revenues in the music industry famously peaked in 1999. This was largely due to the disruption of the industries main form of distribution (physical CD and Vinyl sales). The main cause of this disruption was the advent of the internet and convergence culture. Because the internet was becoming more and more accessible the industry saw a shift to digital forms of distribution.
DIGITAL SALES BECAME THE NEW NORM:
During the shift from analog to digital distribution, the industry saw a rise in digital sales of music, although some platforms saw success with this method, notably iTunes, apples music player still asks users to pay a fee to download their albums and remains comparatively profitable.
However due to the nature of digital distribution, piracy of music was made incredibly easy and paying for music downloads was becoming less and less justifiable for consumers. As mentioned previously the file sharing capabilities of the internet was a big contributor to the decline in music industry revenues.
Consumers showed they were no longer willing to pay a premium price for a CD with things like piracy.
As seen here CD sales peaked in the year 2000 and have been on a steady decline ever since. The music industry then tried
They were promptly replaced with streaming services like youtube or spotify. This meant that streams of revenue also changed.
For example the streaming service spotify asks listeners to pay a monthly subscription fee for Spotify premium. The revenue is then divided amongst artists, people who had more plays get a higher percentage of the revenue.
(I used this calculator to estimate how much money Bjork could be making)
Another stream of revenue is youtube ads. If you upload your music video onto youtube you can chose to run ads on it, the revenue generated from these ads is split between youtube and the artist.
Although these are valid revenue streams, they still do not compare to the revenues of physical sales.
However it is worth mentioning that there is still demand for some forms of physical music, most notably vinyls. According to this article vinyl sales increased 30% in 2020 and have now surpassed CD sales. This is likely because vinyl still remains the highest quality music format. However the industry is still dominated by streaming which makes up 83% of the revenue while physical sales make up about 9%.
In recent years since the decline of physical sales, the primary streams of music industry revenue has shifted to touring and merch sales. Here I look at Ed Sheeran the 2nd most streamed artist on Spotify. In the graphs above we can see that Ed Sheerans ticket sales alone dwarf his physical/streaming revenue. This is likely due to convergence, as the means to distribute your music to an international audience have become accessible to most people.
A good example of this is the digital service Distro Kid, which allows for anybody to release their music on all major streaming platforms like Spotify (which isnt usually accessible to anyone).
This makes things like marketing and branding (distribution) more important as these things will directly translate to ticket and merch sales. This again gives distributors more power as they have the resources to run elaborate and wide reaching marketing campaigns for their artists.
For example, The Weeknd who is signed to Republic Records which is a subsidiary of UMG, a big 3 conglomerate. He has also been featured multiple times on the billboards at Times Square in New York which is not something that is accessible to most indie distributors.
UNIVERSAL FURTHERS ITS STRANGLEHOLD ON THE MUSIC INDUSTRY:
BBFC MUSIC VIDEO AGE RATINGS:
The BBFC have started giving music videos age ratings. This could mean some of the biases seen in the film industry (with films distributed by big 5 receiving lower age ratings for what would be seen as inappropriate content) may be carried over to the music industry. This rule applies specifically to any song distributed by a British label
According to the BBFC this move was to protect children from potentially harmful content by "helping parents and children chose the most appropriate music videos"
Dizee Rascals "Couple of Sack" music video is the first music video to have received an 18+ rating.
PIRACY AND THE RISE OF FREE MUSIC:
In the year 2000 music industry revenue peaked. Since then music industry revenues have been on the decline. The main disruptor was napster, originally a file sharing service which was used to share music on an international scale. This was originally considered piracy, but since then downloads and streaming has become the industry standard.
PRODUCT PLACEMENT MAKING ITS WAY INTO MUSIC VIDEOS:
In recent times I have noticed some music videos feature shots that contain branded products. This has lead me to bleieve that much like in film, music videos are beginning to feature product placements. This could be a response to the falling music industry revenues as this provides an alternative stream of income.
For example J Balvin and Skrillexes song "In Da Ghetto" features multiple shots seemingly advertising the banking service/credit card company "Current"
Another example of this is Doja Cats "Woman" in which she is seen wearing beats earphones.
Ive noticed that it is mostly larger artists that feature product placement in their videos. This links into the idea that artists are now becoming more like social media influencers as especially with these examples alot of younger people look up to them, which probably makes it easier to secure a product placement deal.
UGC:
Likely due to the rise of streaming and the development of Web 2.0, it has been increasingly common to find UGC or user generated content. This has become a new way in which fans can engage with artists and subsequently has begun to replace the old media model, where consumers where mostly passive.
Some labels have gone as far as to encourage UGC, Billie Eilish famously launched a campaign where her fans could submit covers of her hit single "Bad Guy" and a software would generate a video mashup of randomly selected covers.
A more extreme example of of this phenomenon is when the band Depeche Mode let fans run their facebook page while they were on tour.
Through this page on their website, fans could be randomly selected to run the
K-POP FANS RALLY IN FAVOUR OF THE BLM MOVMENT:
A fancam is typically referred to as a fandoms obsessive and single minded focus on what they find entertaining. This links into hebdiges sub-cultrue as most of thes fans are members of the k-pop subculture, connoted by their use of words like "stan" or "bias". The use of these words or the dedication to this culture (buying merch, going to shows, etc...) is then rewarded with cultural capital (Beaudrieu). These fancams will spam (the sending of multiple unsolicited messages) threads that contain images of their favorite k-pop groups.
During the Black Lives Matter protests the police put out a tweet (post on twitter) asking people to submit videos of people or talk about people being unlawful. After a viral tweet was out out by a respected member of the k-pop community.
This in turn led to numerous fancams spamming the account with k-pop related content as it was believed the police would use the submitted information to harm protestors. They then flooded the app that these requests were being submitted through making it effectively unusable for a short period of time.
This then sparked a wider culture of aiding in similar protests for the k-pop fandom.
1: Combine your points on big 3 + globalisation. Give an additional, UP TO DATE, infographic/stat on big 3. Try to note the opposite too: Indies. While doing so, put your artist in context: show whether she's Indie, big 3...or both?
2: Put terms in bold/pink – but while doing so, copy/paste into a Word doc (save as: Terms Used in Blog Posts, use post name/link as sub-heading). Add this list to the top of the post when complete.
1: Combine your points on big 3 + globalisation. Give an additional, UP TO DATE, infographic/stat on big 3. Try to note the opposite too: Indies.
ReplyDeleteWhile doing so, put your artist in context: show whether she's Indie, big 3...or both?
2: Put terms in bold/pink – but while doing so, copy/paste into a Word doc (save as: Terms Used in Blog Posts, use post name/link as sub-heading). Add this list to the top of the post when complete.
ReplyDelete