> CDs used to be crazy expensive. They cost much more than what was reasonable.
A market economy determines the value of goods by what people are willing to pay for it. Apparently, halfing the record price would not have doubled the sales, so the vinyl/CD price reflected the value of the music pretty well. But nowadays, legal music streaming has to compete against illegal piracy, which is free and only a little inconvenient, so the streaming price is forced to a very low level. Musicians can hardly make money from music sales anymore. If you make a type of music that isn't well suited for concerts, and you aren't massively popular, you are screwed.
>I usually listen to a song multiple times each day.
Used to be I bought a CD for say $10, listened to it probably hundreds to thousands of times, say around a penny per listen. Then I'd resell the CD, say for $5, and someone else could get another 1000 listens with no money going to an artist.
An artist used to get around 10% minus packaging costs, so say at most $1 per CD.
So an artist then could get under 0.1 cents per listen, maybe vastly less.
Next, a song plays on the radio to millions, and the artist gets (?). I think that was quite small too. Even then, touring was where most of the money was made - the CD and radio game was to get exposure and fans, many of whom would then pay $50-$100 for one evening of listening to the band live.
I'm not sure how all the econ works out now without spending too much time digging into it, but making music has never been a good income stream for any but a tiny, tiny percent of artists.
> I remember when CD's came out and started to displace vinyl. We were told the high price of the CD would come down to the price of vinyl. Records were about $8 or so at the time, CD's double that. Yeah, no, that never happened.
What are you talking about? CDs today are about $16 on Amazon. If they were $16 back in the 1980s, that's pretty remarkable, because inflation should make them much, more more now. CDs really have come down in price.
> This is bullshit. It used to be possible to make a living off of selling recorded music, whether records or cds, and people cared about, and bought albums, in large numbers.
It still is. But let's break down the "bullshit." It used to be possible to make a living driving a horse drawn buggy. Then things changed. Fewer people wanted or needed this, the value went down accordingly.
A different mechanism but the same principle. The cost to produce and distribute recorded music is plummeted. There is a saturated markets for artists and recorded music. Is it a surprise that the value of a play has dropped accordingly?
>> For instance, pricey CDs prevented lots of people from listening to music.
Nope. Nobody I knew in the 90s had this issue. In fact, higher prices caused more people to listen to more music. Unable to afford CDs, the kids turned to Napster. After that they had access to more music than any generation in history. This in turn forced the music industry to change, to create online delivery platforms. Napster might be gone, but those 90s CD prices are why we have streaming services today.
>I grew up in the age of the CD transition, and CDs were how I bought my first music. It was touted as cheaper (but got more expensive) and the quality of the music went down (1-2 good songs on an album).
I more 'came of age' in the CD transition era, but to claim that quality of music went down after one's youth has been proclaimed since before Neanderthals banged rocks together. The whole reason 45's and later single cassettes existed was to get people to at least buy that One Hit off an album rather than the whole thing.
> I'm also intrigued by how many very wealthy people are unwilling to pay $10/mo to stream music/video and/or share passwords, when I recall paying $20/CD at the record store in 1998 dollars. You can listen to basically every song you want for the year for the price of (inflation adjusted) 2.5 CDs purchased by my mallrat teenage self back then.
I'm willing to pay $10/mo to play music but that gets me access to near-all music I want access to, on all devices I use. A CD can be just in one place at once and needs a specific player. So it's a terrible comparison.
> The flip-side is that most of those metal bands now make almost no money on people listening to their music compared to what they did when they sold CDs through a lot of indie record companies.
I have a few friends who were selling CDs back in the 90s for their own bands, none of them make almost any money out of it. Even the ones that got some kind of distribution deal to some specialised record shops, it wouldn't sell any meaningful amount to even cover the costs of printing the CDs.
The lucky ones with a label deal got almost no money after covering recording, printing, distribution expenses.
The only kind of people who ever made money from selling albums are exactly the same making money from music in 2024: big artists, with a lot of marketing and hectic touring schedules.
Nothing has changed in that front, at least now musicians can put their songs up for the world to consume instead of just the patrons of a corner shop in their neighbourhood.
> We were told the high price of the CD would come down to the price of vinyl. Records were about $8 or so at the time, CD's double that. Yeah, no, that never happened.
Is this in the US? By the end of the 90s, before piracy truly took off, Best Buy and Walmart were regularly selling new CDs, big releases from big names, for $12-13, and they'd pretty quickly get discounted to $10 or less depending on age. Plenty of popular 80s CDs could be had brand new for $5.
As a music collector, Best Buy was amazing. Racks upon racks, seemingly endless selection of indie bands, I even talked up a guy to order in some imports for me (those were definitely $20+ though).
I do remember going to the mall during this time and seeing stores like Sam Goody sell the same stuff as Best Buy, but SG's CDs were all $18 and $20. It never made sense to me, and I don't know how they lasted so long.
> I'm also intrigued by how many very wealthy people are unwilling to pay $10/mo to stream music/video and/or share passwords, when I recall paying $20/CD at the record store in 1998 dollars.
Because everything is a recurring automatic charge to my credit card, and one more thing to try and keep track of and continually reevaluate if it's still valuable enough to me to continue paying for it.
When you bought a CD you didn't have to from that point forward continue to think about if you want to continue paying money to have access to the CD.
> You can buy physical and digital copies of any artist in the world, artists can set up Patreon accounts, and you with a small amount of ingenuity can probably even mail your favorite artists a check directly.
> The issue is that people don't do this
People did do this. From the time legit outlets like iTunes appeared to up through around 2013, revenue from digital recording sales rose into the billions, on the road to matching 90s CD sales. But then they fell dramatically over the last 5 years, and we shouldn't talk about this as if it's a law of the internet or there's a big mystery why. Streaming services offered on-demand listening of huge catalogs for a fraction of the price. Consequently, the demand for purchased recordings dropped, and artists get paid a fraction of a fraction.
Patronage is nice, I'm glad the option exists, it's one of the rays of light.
Still it lacks one of the virtues of retailed recordings: you know how much you're supposed to pay to make a meaningful economic contribution. Do you want to listen to this song again and again? Great, pay an asking price for a single or album, you have done your part. Or decide it's not that important and listen to it when it comes up on transient music services like terrestrial radio or shuffle-streaming. Or decide it's kindof important and pirate but you know in the back of your head you haven't really meaningfully participated yet and you'll need to decide to one day (which is another thing services like Spotify work against -- they grant an imprimatur of legitimacy which erases that sense in the back of your head that you might owe something).
> But how much do you personally pay for the artists' products per month
All in all, entertainment budget is a good amount actually.
For the sake of the argument, it’s easier to set the time frame 30 years back, and talk about CDs and books we were buying. Record companies made decent money, publishers as well. People massively payed for physical distribution, there was only crappy workarounds.
But most of that money didn’t go to artists, most of them were still working side jobs, while middlemen thrived. How different is it now ? I actually think it’s slightly better these days, but the biggest slice of the pie still go to middlemen who protect their position to keep the markets captive.
> But the price they tried to extract back then was completely unreasonable and I think those excesses contributed heavily to the current situation.
Yes that left incurable trauma. During late 90s to early 00s CD costed the same in Germany and in any post-communist country whose economies were in shambles. Something around 12 EUR which would be 18 EUR inflation adjusted now. I was wandering between shelves like a pariah and asking shop assistant like a beggar to insert the CD into the player so I could listen it in shop for few minutes. Music industry worked hard to make enemies for life.
>Here's my thinking about the decision on the part of an artist to release their entire catalog to the public for free: if digital distribution has rendered direct sales to the customer significantly less worthwhile than it once was, they need some alternate source of promotion and revenue. A move like this would likely increase the artists' visibility in the public's eye without significantly harming their total revenues.
Well, if their primary source of revenue were the releases,
then the switch to digital (and the ease of just getting it from a pirate say even for people who would have ordinarily bought the LP/CD), then their total revenue is significantly harmed to begin with.
So, with sales hampered, mostly gimmicks like merchandise remain (for bands that catter to immature people buying branded t-shirts and the like, e.g not gonna really work for jazz or classical or tons of other genres).
And, of course, concerts. But those mostly apply to genres and bands with big enough fanbases to be able to have concerts and make a buck. For the rest, concerts are mostly lossing money (and were historically loss leaders for records sales for most bands).
> In music, the story is even starker than in television. At one time, consumers used to buy a collection of songs — on vinyl, cassette and then compact disc. It was possible to
buy a single song or two in these formats, but the internet facilitated more and more people downloading individual
tracks.
Yet, today, there is an inexorable consumer shift to all-you-can-eat bundles of music.
Well, music often comes out as thematic albums, I don't see a problem with that. There are good stores where you can buy albums, and individual tracks as well if you choose. Bandcamp for instance indicated they are gradually growing, so there is clearly a market for that.
> They same forces in the record industry have figured out how to screw streaming up in their favor now too.
That force is simply the economics of a winner take all market, especially where the product is a luxury good that people can do without. The record companies do not earn huge profits either.
> I grew up during the age of peak CD sales, and I still only bought like ten audio CDs in my life, all of them on the secondary market.
This is the kind of anecdote that tries to make an example that proves the argument, but it's so wildly different from the average music consumer in the 1990s that it's completely irrelevant.
You bought 10 CDs at a 2nd hand store in your entirely life and now you pay more for Spotify. But most people were buying 10, or 20, or 30, or more CDs a year, .... and now they're paying _less_ for Spotify.
A market economy determines the value of goods by what people are willing to pay for it. Apparently, halfing the record price would not have doubled the sales, so the vinyl/CD price reflected the value of the music pretty well. But nowadays, legal music streaming has to compete against illegal piracy, which is free and only a little inconvenient, so the streaming price is forced to a very low level. Musicians can hardly make money from music sales anymore. If you make a type of music that isn't well suited for concerts, and you aren't massively popular, you are screwed.
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