Bei meiner Recherche zu physischen Medien bin ich auf dieses Diagramm der Musikindustrie gestoßen. Wenn Sie irgendwo online gehen, ist das herkömmliche "Weisheit" ist, dass Streaming zu einem Einbruch der physischen Medienverkäufe geführt hat. Aber wenn diese Diagramme korrekt sind, dann sieht die Sache ganz anders aus.
- Quelle für das Diagramm zu Musikverkäufen/-einnahmen von 1973–2002
- Quelle für das Umsatzdiagramm 1999–2024
Beide Diagramme machen deutlich, dass 2005 ein Wendepunkt für die Musikindustrie ist und die Einnahmen bis etwa 2015 weiterhin im freien Fall verharrten. Was war also die Ursache für den starken Umsatzeinbruch, von dem sich die Musikindustrie immer noch nicht erholt hat?
Die üblichen potenziellen Kandidaten (Keiner davon scheint die Antwort zu sein)
YouTube wurde 2005 gegründet, die meisten Songs und Musikvideos wurden jedoch erst hochgeladen, nachdem die Musikindustrie nach 2011 mit der Erstellung von Künstlerprofilen begann. Das bedeutet, dass YouTube zumindest bis zu diesem Zeitpunkt nichts damit zu tun hatte, die Einnahmen der Branche zu untergraben.
Streaming-Plattformen:
- Spotify wurde 2005 gegründet, die meisten großen Titel wurden jedoch erst etwa 2012 angeboten, daher ist es äußerst unwahrscheinlich, dass Spotify etwas mit dem Zusammenbruch nach 2005 zu tun hatte.
Finanzkrise 2008:
- Ereignete sich im Jahr 2008. Hat nichts mit dem Zusammenbruch von 2005 zu tun, auch wenn es wahrscheinlich nichts geholfen hat.
In diesen Diagrammen fehlen einige Dinge, um zu einer Schlussfolgerung zu gelangen.
Theorie 1:
- Der Umsatz gibt keinen Hinweis auf das Verkaufsvolumen.
Wie hoch war das Volumen der Musikverkäufe in den Jahren 1999, 2005 und 2015? Wenn es relativ gleich bleibt, wäre die Schlussfolgerung, dass die Einnahmen aufgrund der aggressiven Konkurrenz von Plattformen wie iTunes, die Songs und Alben billiger verkauften, eingebrochen sind, was zu insgesamt geringeren Einnahmen führte.
Ich glaube auch nicht, dass das der Fall ist. Das Argument für digitale Plattformen wie iTunes war, dass Unternehmen kein Geld mehr für physische Medien und Verpackungen ausgeben müssten (die etwa 2 bis 5 US-Dollar pro CD kosten), sodass sie Geld sparen würden, was den Gewinn steigern und die Kosten für die Verbraucher ausgleichen würde, sodass sie einen günstigeren Zugang hätten, was dazu hätte führen sollen, dass die Leute mehr und nicht weniger Musik kaufen.
Theorie 2:
Ein weiteres Argument ist, dass die Musikindustrie nur einer von vielen Indikatoren für die Gesundheit der Wirtschaft ist und wie viel überschüssiges Kapital in einer Wirtschaft für bestimmte Generationen vorhanden ist. Ein Zusammenbruch im Jahr 2005 (ab 1999) würde darauf hindeuten, dass jeder, der in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren geboren wurde, Schwierigkeiten hatte, seinen Lebensunterhalt zu bestreiten.
- Steigende Lebensmittelkosten, Miete, Wohnraum (was letztendlich zur Depression von 2008 führte) usw.
Streaming-Plattformen haben zur Erholung der Musikindustrie beigetragen, indem sie eine Gruppe von Menschen mit sehr geringem Einkommen ansprechen, indem sie Songs kostenlos oder nahezu umsonst anbieten.
Dies würde aber auch darauf hindeuten, dass Abonnementdienste im Allgemeinen eine Reaktion auf die wirtschaftliche Katastrophe sind, in der sich viele Familien derzeit befinden.
Theorie 3:
Genau wie beim Zusammenbruch des Spielemarkts im Jahr 1983, als die Qualität der Spiele und Ports in einem Wettlauf nach unten ging, um möglichst viel Umsatz zu erzielen, konzentrierte sich die Musikindustrie mehr auf die Erzielung von Gewinnen und begann, Volumen über Qualität zu stellen.
Das Ergebnis war ein Massenzustrom talentloser Künstler und Betrüger, die versuchten, leicht Geld zu verdienen, was die Branche in einem Klima degradierte, in dem Käufer an bedeutungsvolle Songs gewöhnt waren.
Durch die Verbreitung wertloser und bedeutungsloser Songs, die ältere Generationen nur mit Lärm vergleichen, wurden Käufer (die über das gesamte verfügbare Einkommen verfügten) völlig abgeschreckt und entschieden sich stattdessen dafür, bei ihren bestehenden Musikbibliotheken zu bleiben. Mittlerweile konzentrierten sich Musiklabels viel zu sehr darauf, Popmusik voranzutreiben.
Kinder, die in den 1990er- und 2000er-Jahren aufgewachsen sind und sich fast ausschließlich an das Pop-Genre richten, verfügen immer noch nicht über die finanzielle Stabilität und das verfügbare Einkommen ihrer Eltern. Es gab also einen Zustrom von Musik, die sich an eine Generation richtete, die kein Geld hat, während die Generation, die Geld hat, von dem Müll, der produziert wird, so abgeschreckt ist, dass sie einfach aufgehört hat, etwas zu kaufen.
Abschluss:
Ich glaube nicht, dass Streaming-Dienste oder digitale Plattformen etwas mit dem Umsatzeinbruch zu tun haben. Ein Umsatzeinbruch weist auf einen Umsatzeinbruch hin, und der einzige Grund dafür wäre die wirtschaftliche Situation der Käufer (Theorie 2) oder eine Kombination aus wirtschaftlicher Not der aktuellen Generation und dem Abgang gebildeter Käufer, die in einer Zeit zunehmender Slop Musik mit Sinn und Zweck gewohnt sind [Theory 3]
Das bedeutet nicht, dass es keine gebildeten und talentierten Musiker mehr gibt. Nur dass es in einem immer größer werdenden Meer von Abfällen weitaus weniger davon gibt.
Natürlich könnte die Antwort nichts davon sein. Hat jemand etwas gesehen, das mir fehlt, oder kann er direkte Erfahrungen mitteilen?
Von ReclusiveEagle
29 Kommentare
Pandora took off heavily and rapidly in 2005.
By the year 2000 kids were downloading entire mp3 libraries p2p on college campuses.
The CD sales collapse which was the entire market started way before 2005 when napster released.
The golden age of music piracy.
Sorry if I missed it but is it inflationadjusted?
If not it’s not coming back.
None of that mentions illegal music sharing.
Making mixtapes and copying tapes was a big thing into the 90s, but from 99-2001 there was Napster and then the world and their dog sharing their mp3s and burning CDs, followed by sharing online. My guess is that was huge by 2005, when people didn’t really want CDs because they didn’t have good art like vinyl had.
The Internet and piracy. Napster, then BitTorrent, were the really big ones.
Free streaming. Why pay when you get it free. Then ads got out of control and paid streaming took off.
Could you add a marker where Napster got introduced?
If the graph showed some measure of Music Acquired, the peak would be about 98-03. My college had a search functionality that someone stood up, that would search everyone’s public music folders. You could grab as much music as you could store on you. This of course was all on Zip Disks. I’d grab about a gig every day.
The numbers are inflation adjusted, and actually not _that_ much lower in 2015 compared to ca 1985. The introduction of CDs around 1985, ment that lots of boomers re-purchased their favourite classic rock albums.
Also, CDs were more expensive in the shops than vinyl at the time, so even with identical album sales, actual income and profit grew for the industry. This growth lasted for some years, with a peak around 2000.
News from 1992: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-05-03-ca-2007-story.html
«CDs rejuvenated album sales in the ‘80s, but business is declining again and retailers say that’s because the labels won’t cut prices. (…)
Knowing how much she loves music, Bonds decided to buy her something that he hadn’t even bought himself: a compact-disc player.
Bonds found one on sale for $129 at an electronics store and then headed for Tower Records in West Hollywood to get her a $50 gift certificate. He figured that amount ought to enable her to get a good start on a collection–maybe six or eight CDs.
“Boy, was I wrong,” Bonds says, standing near the cash register. “I gave the sales girl my $50 and just before I left, I asked her, ‘So, how many CDs will my daughter be able to get for this?’ And she looks back at me and says, ‘Oh, maybe three.’
“ *Three* ? I was stunned. I feel kind of bad about the whole thing. Maybe I should have bought her a tape player instead of a CD unit. I mean, how’s she ever going to be able to afford to buy any music?”»
The iPod changed everything. It wasn’t napster that killed the CD, and hurt the music industry, it was the iPod. Redditors glamorize software like napster cause of nostalgia, but the trendy iPod that your little sister got for Christmas was the real catalyst.
iPod hype peaked around 2004-2007.
That got people to download more mp3s off torrents or wherever they could get them, which hurt music profits. people now had an easy way to access their entire media library. It was truly game changing.
No cdrs or having to take a heavy laptop to a party just to listen to music.
Just use your iPod, instead. It made you the DJ. and possibly gave you cool points in your friends group.
„I don’t think streaming services or digital platforms had anything to do with the collapse in revenue.“
Wrong.
As others mentioned, the big dip in revenue likely coincides more with a rise in P2P sharing, torrenting, people ripping music from YouTube and other sites, etc. In other words, demand for music and entertainment was as high as it ever was, but the market was unable to monetize or capture the trend of audio moving towards a digital format where people could share music with each other over the internet, rather than having to purchase physical.
Apple tried to profit off of this with iTunes single format, but that was pretty much limited to people who wanted to go about things the ‚right way‘.
There was also the period of time in which platforms like Soundcloud dominated music streaming. This was before DSPs like Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Tidal, etc. forced monetization. You had artists like Chance the Rapper hitting a billion plays on Soundcloud, and that platform was pretty much not generating revenue for the artists. It was just an underground surge of artists and talent where people made what they wanted to, not incentivized by labels or profit. Bandcamp will always exist, but I’m not quite sure we’ll ever see such an artist-centric platform like Soundcloud take off again with any success against the monolithic competitors now.
Nowadays, companies have found ways to incentivize people back onto paid streaming platforms enough that things can generally be monetized again. I do expect streaming to hit a point it’s globally surpassing even more revenue than physical CD sales at its peak. Unfortunately, the big problem on the horizon is navigating AI slop and how do we prevent that monetization from going to users pushing derivative stuff stolen off the backs of others.
I’ve had this debate a while ago on a different sub.
The IFPI is happily showing off how the industry has rebounded since piracy crushed the CD market through streaming. Look at the IFPI’s numbers here on page 7 – Total music revenue is up! [GMR2026_SOTI2.pdf](https://www.ifpi.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/GMR2026_SOTI2.pdf)
But why are artists complaining that they aren’t making money anymore? Unless you’re a huge star, most artists make less money on recordings today than artists of similar stature in the 90s.
Let’s start with a bit of background. The RIAA and other industry groups normalize numbers based on something called an Album Equivalent Unit. So this is how you can compare streaming vs CD sales, vs itunes digital singles sales.
The conversion goes:
1 physical copy sold = 1500 streams = 10 digital singles sold.
This is because it is equalized on revenue – All three of these sources pay out $6 – 7 in revenue to the rightsholder.
So if your album goes platinum (in the US that would be 1 million units), the rightsholder would earn $6 -7 million. Note the keyword rightsholder – typically that would be the record label.
The first thing you’d notice is that well, revenue hasn’t kept up with inflation, but costs are going up. Whether it is CD prices, Spotify subscriptions, or iTunes pricing, prices have stayed constant for years. iTunes is still charging 99 cents a song, same as they did 20 years ago.
An album that went platinum 20 years ago makes $6-7 million, same as an album today, but $6-7 million is worth less today, and the costs of recording and production have gone up.
The second is that there used to be two major categories of artist that IFPI does not capture.
The first is tiny artists – the IFPI has no visibility on non-official distribution streams. For example, if a guy plays guitar in his basement and sold a couple of CDs he burned himself to his buddies, making $20, it doesn’t get counted in the total revenue figure. Today, the same guy gets a couple thousand streams on spotify, make a couple bucks there, but it is counted in the revenue figure.
So when the IFPI publishes revenue numbers in the pre-streaming era, there’s a lot of tiny artists who individually make very little revenue, but cumulatively made a decent amount of revenue that they just didn’t capture.
The second is geographical distribution. Back in the day, customers in some markets like the US, UK, Japan, etc, bought music. But many markets like say, China, Algeria, or El Salvadore mostly relied on piracy. So a big chunk of the world essentially did not contribute to the IFPI total global revenue number.
Now streaming is popular worldwide, suppressing piracy yes, but it does mean that it captures a lot more markets. So like, the US accounted for a far higher share of the total global revenue in 1999 than it does today.
Such a nice visualisation! Props for sharing data that is actually beautiful.
Minor gripe is having 8-track beneath vinyl since vinyl predates 8- tracks
This is a lot of work to do without, apparently, doing any research whatsoever.
I didn’t buy many CDs after Napster started.
But also I think the media consolidation (allowed by the Telecommunications Act of 1997?) made the big radio stations safe and boring and homogenous. So interesting music didn’t get big.
Near the end of the CD as the dominant media, a new album cost over $25.
Unlike other media, they got more expensive as time went on, not less.
So I got a mini disc player, lol. And like so many other people, stopped buying and started downloading.
Listen to NoFX – Dinosaurs will die. Fat Mike explains it all.
Vinyls is the lowkey winner
The answer isn’t in the graph. See that „MP3“ sales? That’s the visible MP3. What broke the market was the unseen MP3 sharing.
Music piracy. When I was in college in the early 2000s, it was quite common for people to have collections of hundreds or thousands of MP3s stored on a hard drive. This, not legal music, was what drove consumer appetites for things like the original iPod.
Oh Eight Tracks. We loved you so and yet your time was so short here.
The charts are pretty, the first one looks like it belongs on the cover of a 90s magazine.
The wall of text underneath reads as AI generated, or at best collaborated on. And nothing new said.
This is on data is beautiful – just present the data and let the readers discuss.
That was when piracy took over. You can see it really started in 2000 not 2005.
By 2015 the industry had figured out how to fight back — streaming license fees. But there was a permanent drop in revenue because consumers were now weilding the power of free (though illegal) against what the providers wanted to charge.
If providers had put streaming prices where they needed to be get back to 2000-level revenues, people wouldn’t have switched away from piracy. But at the lower prices they landed on they were able to get back a decent chunk of the revenue lost.
There’s also supply-side considerations to take into account. In the same way it was easy for people to get name-brand music for free (internet) the barriers to entry for other musician’s/labels were dropped greatly by the easy distribution provided by the internet. So the natural monopoly-esque revenues the labels were able to get under the old system went away with disintermediation; musicians able to get in front of fans directly at much lower cost, and try to monetize their audience some other way or simply be okay just barely scraping by.
Doesn’t it actually look like that peak in the 90s is anomalous, rather than a baseline we need to „return to“? Looks like the collapse actually brought us back down to a normal historical level of revenue.
I’m also curious about how *consumer spending* compares. The industry plays money games. I want to know if streaming has actually caused people to spend more for music since we used to just buy one beloved album at a time, and now we’re paying monthly for the privilege instead
My personal theory is that music became terrible after I stopped being a teenager.
… kids and their mumble raps …
You’re forgetting the live music factor. And the consolidation of the radio industry [edit: which might as well include the destruction of Music Television, FUSE, VH1, BET, CMT… almost unanimously in favor of reality television brainslop /edit] which is related to the evolution of the distribution methods, which you did mention, but looking at dollar values is only going to give you one angle. Part of it, sure, but not the whole thing.
This is a topic I have my own theories about – which are [well founded](https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/1kf18h9/comment/mqnki5d/). Simply put, it’s complicated. A combination of a lot of small things, much like most of our problems over the last few decades. But also, summarized as… the same as most of our problems the last few decades: declining fairness and increasing resource/access/“power“ consolidation. It’s all the same. Things are, truthfully, neither top-down or bottom-up. In a healthy ecosystem, of any kind, there is some kind of information/energy transfer (aka communication) between the layers/participants/etc. What we have had „evolve“, overwhelmingly, is systems that increasingly forcefully attempt to impose things top-down, completely ignoring all feedback. Result: catastrophe. Worse than catastrophe, catastrophe that is effectively „invisible“
TLDR: they done replaced healthy music and culture with optimization for „engagement“. In a word – politicks
Dude, way too many words. Put away the yarn and pins with all your conspiracy theories.
It was piracy. Pure and simple. Before music producers/artists realized they could actually make money on streaming.