Know am going to be downvoted into oblivion, but as a composer, can see it from the side of creators. Yeah, making their products free is starving these industries. For instance, in music, there is already very little money in music (think about how many musicians you personally know who can make a living off of music, besides being a music teacher). And, the music industry is still not even the same size as it was in 90's - global revenue in 2024 was $29 billion, while in 1994, in was $35 billion (and that's not even taking into account inflation).
Yes, there are many other reason why the music industry fell, but when your main demographic can always go to bittorrent to get their music if prices are too high, then there is only so much you can do with the price of music.
Yeah, I remember the 90's, music was huge, and there were so many good bands (Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, REM, White Stripes... Or if you're more into popular music, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston...). Now, music is de-valued and cheap and our music scene has been decimated. Personally, think we should try to find ways to support musicians, writers, thinkers, artists...
... but if you have a different opinion, no worries. But, if you can, give it thought.
The ideal situation would be building a society that believes everyone deserves to be fed, clothed, and housed regardless of their ability to make profitable things. Weird how politically unpopular that seems to be.
Both producers and consumers of media are in the same boat of barely surviving. Maybe we can work with each other instead of against each other? :)
That is a very nice thought, have been told the Europeans seem to do this to a much higher degree:)
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Streaming has replaced piracy, and scammed artists in the process. You can complain to the labels for that.
As for why I download: I am legally forbidden from buying the music that I want. Either it's the selling label geoblocking, or they only sell versions in a shitty format like mp3. I'm not jumping through hoops to give you my money, either I can buy FLAC files, or I download.
I want convenience, the same way users want it. Artists discovered that they were scammed by the labels instead of the pirates.
I think a lot has happened since the 90's, and you rightfully point out that there was very little money in music to begin with. Labels generally always took a very large fraction of a physical CD sale, for example, so the model was rather rigged from the beginning (and recorded music doesn't have that long of a history, anyway).
In general, I'd argue that Spotify will be more toxic to the industry (or the artists' livelihood) than piracy. Streaming is even more predatory and centralized than labels in the 90's, but with an important caveat: it's legal. When people engage in piracy there is at least some awareness of, say, the pirate being at fault in the transaction — even though, as someone else already mentioned, people who pirate might contribute, or engage in other ways, with the creators. But with streaming, it got normalized to pay artists a fraction of a cent per stream (and the terms get progressively worse). I've countless times heard the argument "at least they get paid something!"
Bandcamp, for example, seems like a much fairer ideal for the industry. Luckily, the Epic buyout a few years ago did not immediately ruin the business.
As for the music in the 90's...music has changed. Naturally, one could argue that these are also exciting times: one can singlehandedly produce a record, distribute it independently, and be touring all over Europe without ever having to sign off to a major label. Is this not a good thing — or at least, a notable one? Of course, there's still great music around.
Yeah, usually, have also read that the only ones to make music on Spotify are major artists. They take a huge chunk of the the money distributed to musicians. At least for me, have never heard of any musician making a living off of their Spotify sales, not even close.
And Bandcamp does seem nice, wish it took off more.
And yes, I do completely agree with you that there are some big positives with today's music landscape. The rise of Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) to create your own music was a revolution, as is youtube for getting your music to the masses. Seems like a ton of musicians got their break from this these days... ...So as we talk, am thinking, maybe piracy has become a unimportant aspect of the music industry?? Hmm... Well, one aspect is missing, the seasoned engineers, producers, marketers and managers who can get your music created, promoted and performed all without the musician's needing to learn all this themselves. It really is a lot of work!
Even well-known artists don't make meaningful amounts of money off of Spotify if they're not currently topping the charts. Year before last, I think it was, "Weird Al" Yankovic announced that he had made enough off of Spotify that year to buy "a pretty nice sandwich".
Yeah, Spotify is the worst:)
The devaluation happened through streaming services. Instead of spending dozens of dollars on subscriptions, BitTorrent and last.fm enables me to find what I like and spend the money on Bandcamp instead where it actually reaches the artist I am buying from. I can just get a Spotify subscription instead though, if you insist.
Yeah, streaming does continue to keep music prices low, but for us who followed the music industry, the major damage to pricing happened 25 years ago. This was when p2p file sharing was at its height, and the music industry was in a tail spin and revenue was nose diving. Then the iTunes store came out and allowed customers to be single songs for a dollar (instead of the whole album). This was a necessary compromise the music industry had to do because young people weren't buying music any more. This sealed the deal and the end of it, the music industry was about half the size it was only a few years ago.
Yeah, Spotify does screw musicians really horribly. Don't know what the solution is, but was talking with someone else here, and maybe piracy is not a big factor with the music industry anymore. With the rise of DAW's so that making music is really easy, and youtube as a primary source to market music, piracy really isn't as big a deal. This sounds reasonable to me (not great state of things, but not bad).
There's also the effect that new musicians are competing for attention with an ever growing catalog of top artists. I already have hundreds of CDs, so I'm not particularly inclined to go find whatever the 2025 version of the Smashing Pumpkins is because I already have the old one. Looking at this year's Billboard 200, I don't think I'd be interested in SZA or Lil Baby. Bowie died almost 10 years ago. I guess I'm good with what I've got.
Definitely... and think about your comment, it's probably what we've all heard, that the teens/twenties is the target demographic for the music industry, as they're the one who go out and buy things. Yeah, I don't buy that much music these days, maybe a few songs and albums per year (and I'm in music!).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305476
EU paid for report that concluded piracy isn’t harmful, tried to hide findings (thenextweb.com)
280 points by tchalla on Sept 21, 2017 | 59 comments
Music got commoditized.
In the 90s the good bands got lucky that their distributors picked them up and promoted them etc. You just don't remember the amount of crap that was on at any given point in time.
Today you have instant access to millions of songs around the world in every genre imaginable: https://everynoise.com/ And not just to the whatever few records your local store carried, or what the Big Four paid the radio stations to promote.
I do agree that youtube has made it much easier to self-promote, and that today's model has replaced the old one and is doing decently. Still, the at least by the numbers, the music industry is still smaller than it used to be. Unfortunately, money is a powerful resource, and it's not like the music industry took everything and completely screwed over the musicians. They helped struggling musicians survive, giving them a chance to make it, while taking care of a lot of the non-music-related tasks that are actually very time consuming - promotion, lining up performances, lining up interviews, learning the successful strategies for giving a band a chance to succeed, networking... It is really another job in itself and is very difficult.
Labels still do this today, but it's just the number of opportunities for musicians is smaller.
Although, again, do agree that youtube (and somewhat spotify from what I've heard) has made a huge difference. I've heard a few times that Youtube is probably one of the best resources for self promoting music, but being good at making videos on youtube is not easy to do well and is also another job in itself.
> I do agree that youtube has made it much easier to self-promote
And Spotify. And Apple Music, to an extent. And even SoundCloud.
> They helped struggling musicians survive, giving them a chance to make it,
Survivorship bias. You're completely ignoring the artists that never got the attention of distributors, or got immediately dropped, or dropped after the first disappointing (by studio standards) sales, or screwed out of revenue and royalties, or...
Or those who never got a chance at all because Sony or Warner paid radio stations to promote who they wanted to promote: https://www.npr.org/2005/11/23/5024411/warner-agrees-to-sett...
> Labels still do this today, but it's just the number of opportunities for musicians is smaller.
Labels still do this to the same extent as before. They spend about as much money and, percentage wise, keep as much money as before. It's even easier for them because a whole layer of physically printing and distributing media (tapes and CDs) is gone.
And the number of opportunities for artists increased, but became more complex.
In 2012 an otherwise unknown outside South Korea artist reached a billion views on Youtube resulting in worldwide tours. Now there are millions of unknowns on the same platforms. It's never been easier to promote your art, and it's never been more complex because there are so many others.
Don't disagree, but am realizing, it's easy to say anything (on my side too) without any proof either way. Yeah, have to admit, don't have any numbers on the total number of artist that are supported by music labels, or the total amount of money they give out. The only numbers I have are that the music industry's revenue crashed in the 2000's, down to nearly half, and only recently has it recovered and is near what it was it its peak in the 90's (but this is without inflation). To me at least, this means the amount of money in the industry has to give out is much lower.
Although yeah, you do have a point that it doesn't take as much money to distribute music. That is definitely a cost savings for musicians and labels (and, as you probably know, DAW's and relatively cheap, high-quality recording equipment have been huge too). Still, not sure how big an effect these are though.
And for me, yeah, can't have surviorship bias, because I've been struggling myself for years to make a living, haha :) But part of it is my fault, am trying to be a composer, and this is one of the worst jobs in the music industry to make money in.
But yeah, do agree that it's well known that labels have screwed over tons of musicians over the past 100 years. Still, at the same time, it's probably a bell curve in terms of those that get screwed vs those that are supported and nurtured. And to me at least, the more money in the system, the more opportunities for good labels to support musicians.
Always been the case. I have a late boomer early Gen x friend, who will insist that music was better back in the day, and that everyone was listening to Zeppelin and such, and nothing else. You can pull up the billboard charts for any year he waxes about and read off the top n, and rarely if ever find a track from the bands he claimed "everyone listened to."
Survivorship bias is and always has been real. If you don't believe me, think about the last time you heard Tubthumping from Chumbawumba on the radio or in a commercial
Don't disagree with that survivorship bias isn't real, everyone thinks the music of their time was the best. Still it's not the only factor at play here, because the music industry was in crisis in the early 2000's and its revenue dropped in half. That is a huge drop, and the less money in the industry, the smaller the pie that goes towards all types of projects, from Tubthumping to Smashing Pumpkin's Rocket.
But do agree that most of the 90's was still pop music (just looked at through the top 100, forgot about most of those groups:)
Are you talking about the billboard hot 100 (singles)? The billboard 200 (albums) seems like what you might expect. e.g. I believe Led Zeppelin never had singles but they had 2 number one albums in 1970.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_200_number-o...
Btw, finally checked out the Every noise at once site, wow, awesome! Great way to find new music!
I agree with you. There's a huge sense of entitlement from people who pirate, and the most absurd set of excuses. I bet most of them would shoplift if it was consequence free. And then complain that shops were going out of business.
Except the chief argument remains the distinction between goods of difficult replication vs goods of cheap replication.
And except all the rest in that illogic.
Interesting question:)
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I'm not convinced that every pirate download equals a lost sale. Certainly sometimes it does, but I don't think it's the case that creators lose much revenue due to piracy. I think the big music labels and giant publishers might -- might. But that's not the same as creators losing money. And we're also unable to count how often piracy results in concert ticket sales that may have otherwise not happened.
> but when your main demographic can always go to bittorrent to get their music if prices are too high, then there is only so much you can do with the price of music.
And that's the thing: if the prices are too high, in the absence of piracy, most people are going to just do without. There's no lost sale when someone decides to do without rather than pay a price they thing is unreasonable.
I think the shift in the music landscape you see is due to three things: 1) your tastes have changed, and everyone looks at the "good old days" with a fondness and appreciation that is often undeserved, 2) the music industry itself has changed, moving away from the album-sales model, and fully embracing streaming (I believe around 70% of revenue comes from streaming these days), and 3) it is easier and cheaper than ever to create high-quality music; sure you need some level of talent, but many of the financial barriers to recording your own music (like the need for an expensive recording studio) have lessened or evaporated entirely.
> And, the music industry is still not even the same size as it was in 90's - global revenue in 2024 was $29 billion, while in 1994, in was $35 billion
This seemed surprising to me, so I did a little bit of light research. This isn't true. Revenue was steadily rising until around 1999, started dropping during the main time of digital disruption, to a low in 2014. In 2024, revenues were 1.5x what they were in the ~1999 peak.
Now, if you do inflation-adjust those numbers, you get a picture more like what you're saying, with a peak around 1999, a sharp decline, and then only a partial recovery.
But total revenue is only one part of the picture, and we can't judge creator impact solely upon that. And at the end of the day, no one is entitled to revenue. Sell a compelling product at a price people are willing to pay, and you'll make money.
Outside of streaming, I personally don't see many compelling products out there when it comes to music. I bought CDs and cassettes as a kid, but I don't see physical media, or even digital album bundles, as purchases worthy of my time. I have a YouTube Music subscription, and that fulfills the entirety of my at-home or on-the-go music needs. On top of that, I go to concerts and festivals when my favorite music is in town, and I'll sometimes buy some merch (like a festival t-shirt). Beyond that, I just don't see a need to spend money on music. (When I think about it, though, I probably do spend more money on music today than I did when I was buying physical media! Some of that is due to my better financial situation now, to be sure, but not all.)
> Personally, think we should try to find ways to support musicians, writers, thinkers, artists...
I absolutely agree, but I don't think piracy has the big negative effect on creators that you think it does.
Appreciate your view, and am no expert at this, but as you mentioned, the numbers do speak for themselves. Yeah, it isn't just "the good old days," we all who followed the music industry saw a huge decline in revenue in the 2000's (it was catastrophic and was as punch to the gut). It just kept going down year after year. And as you mentioned, if you adjust for inflation, the size if the industry is still smaller than it used to be...
...Also, it seems like it depends on where you look for yearly revenue. At least this research article is more like what I saw (although, not sure what numbers are correct): https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-Recorded-Music-In...
Regardless, yeah, the music industry took a huge hit, and is looking better these days with streaming (which saved it), but it's still not great.
>And that's the thing: if the prices are too high, in the absence of piracy, most people are going to just do without. There's no lost sale when someone decides to do without rather than pay a price they thing is unreasonable.
Agreed, if prices are too high, yes, they'll do with out. But in the past, on average, it seems like most people did actually purchase CD's and DVD's, me included. Most of us had quite a sizable collection, and would routinely visit music stores to pay $20 to buy a CD, just because they liked one or two songs (and that's in 90's money). Yes, the music industry took a lot of the share of revenue, but that industry still is what promoted and supported the musicians.