What has streaming done to the music industry?

(they reduced it to their minimum charge tbf)

when i said peer group i meant less “me and my mates” and more “pretty much everyone i’ve ever met who is roughly my age”

I have to say the downloading stuff illegally mid-2000s era passed me by. I wasn’t that engaged with music at the time for various reasons so really I just bought CDs from time to time. But I think the importance of iTunes tends to get overlooked here - basically it provided the convenient, reasonably priced way for most people to buy the music they wanted. I remember going into a pretty large HMV for the first time in years in the early 2000s and I swear it had the same stock (Dire Straits, Phil Collins, Genesis) that it had in the late 80s, so iTunes was radical in it’s own way.

I know the scale is different but kids downloading isn’t really that different from the taping era, you don’t have money when you are that age so sales aren’t being lost. If anything I’d say there’s a good argument that it engages you in music more so you’ll spend more as you get older. I do get that the ‘fear’ from the music industry though was that a generation would grow up expecting music for free - so yeah maybe streaming is filling that gap to a degree, but fwiw in my view I think the main thing Streaming is doing is creating paid for radio - you get people who maybe bought 1 cd a year on average to pay £120 a year every year, the potential revenues are vast. The engagement of music enthusiasts like DiS forum members to Spotify et al I doubt is of any importance.

that’s interesting. to be fair I can imagine that would be difficult to manage though - seem to be an awful lot of scam artists using ‘charities’ as a tax scam especially in the U.S.

better than MP3s, but i still like physical media too. Luckily Spotify and CDs/Vinyl kinda go hand in hand for me

While what’s on the likes of spotify is better than it’s ever been, there’s still tons of back catalogue stuff which isn’t on there, but “a friend” uses Soulseek to find a lot of that weird stuff that labels haven’t bothered putting up. It mainly seems to be obscure 60s stuff and compilations that came out ten years ago but got swiftly deleted which “a friend” would theoretically download.

I hadn’t considered that really. It’d be good if they could set up a thing with Justgiving or something so that all of the funds for that sort of release went direct. Probably a massive hassle for something relatively few people do. The alternative is people just being honest, and that’s not really going to happen

nah theyre the greatest

i think there was likely an age divide, it was obviously less of a thing for less tech-savvy older people, but it felt very, very widespread among younger people and more active music consumers. it’s always felt to me that this is exactly the reason that streaming exists.

tbf i’ve been going to HMV since about the mid 2000s (and Virgin Megastores before that) and it’s definitely had its up and downs in terms of stock, prices etc in that time, but by and large in my experience they’ve always done a decent job of catering to indie bellends and often have a reasonably eclectic selection, despite everyone’s dismissal. some of the independent shops local to me have closed recently so HMV is an essential part of my routine again but i’m often finding decent stuff in there. i’ve got chatting to a couple of staff members at the till who are massive psych fans and tend to keep the place well stocked in Oh Sees records and stuff like that.

Yeah I think it might have been a low point tbh. Can’t say I go regularly but HMV does seem better now. I think it was all part of the problem at the time though, record industry ignoring downloading and still trying to flog the same old stuff on CD that had made them so much money since the mid-80s.

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this is swings and roundabouts, innit. you get people who would have bought one album every 6 months paying a monthly fee for Spotify but you also get others like lots of people on this forum who’ve sold off their huge physical collections to just pay for Spotify every month. dunno what sort of ratio that is, like.

Sure but the holy grail is to get people just to sign up and never think about it again.

Even at absolute peak cd sales there were what 100 million sold a year in the UK? Given lower overheads you’d only need 5/6 million subscribers to achieve the same revenue. Maybe?

I meant profit not revenue

Don’t know if that’s true of Spotify, the data they can harvest from regular users must be pretty valuable.

no idea how much money they make off ad revenue. is it possible they make more money off people who use it regularly but only use the free version?

Good point. Hadn’t thought about it but I guess they sell user info on to third parties not just using to inform ads. Weird how money is made these days.

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