The Music Business is Healthy Again? Really?
I express deep skepticism
I often see headlines like these—proclaiming a new Golden Age for Music.
What a wonderful time for a person like me to be alive! Everyone is having a good year. Everyone will see the sun shine.
But there’s still a tiny problem. When I talk to actual musicians, they tell me the exact opposite.
They’re struggling—more than ever before. Even established artists feel the pinch.
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That’s why my favorite headline on the topic is this one: (courtesy of Billboard):
You can feel the irritation from the headline. Why are these pesky musicians whining? They should be grateful—and they’re griping instead.
According to Billboard, it’s a “paradox.” It’s “difficult to solve.”
But, of course, it isn’t difficult at all. That’s because….
Yes, somebody is making money from music—just not the people who create it.
There’s never been a better time in history to be an intermediary, a middleman, a hanger-on, an aggregator, a shyster.
For a guitarist or keyboardist or singer, not so much.
If you just look at the total size of the music business, you miss these shifts at the grass roots level. And that’s where the real action takes place.
Nobody in the power structure wants to talk about this.
I’ve seen hundreds of articles about the new Golden Age of Music that skip over these ugly details below the surface. Are the journalists ashamed of the truth?Are they kowtowing to advertisers? Or are they just ignorant?
If a parasite attached to your body gets bigger and bigger, that doesn’t mean you’re healthy. It’s thriving by destroying you. Something similar is happening in the culture right now, especially the music culture.
I’m reminded of a meeting where an executive told me: “This would be a great business if it weren’t for the customers.” He said it with a straight face—and I’m still not sure if he was serious or joking.
It’s absurd. Yet a similar attitude is now pervasive inside the music business. It would be a great business if it weren’t for the musicians.
Would they please just stop bellyaching?
What’s scary is that these same industry leaders are hatching plans to reach this crazy goal. For them, the Golden Age of Music involves AI bots making songs on command—and never whining.
If you want to understand the new business model in music, check out this chart—released a few days ago by Duetti in their Music Economics Report.
The tech platforms are making more, and paying musicians less.
The math couldn’t be simpler, and this certainly is no “paradox”—it’s called a squeeze. That’s the usual name when a stronger person forces you to pay more for less.
Let me also point out the obvious. Musicians aren’t the only victims here—the audience is also getting squeezed. You are also paying more and getting less.
Instead of focusing on exciting new music, Spotify prefers to serve up AI slop (acquired on the cheap), fake artists, and lots of old songs.
This is a stark contrast to video streaming—where Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Disney, and others invest tens of billions of dollars annually in creating new films and series.
Music streamers don’t like creating content (that word, ugh!). Other people need to make those risky investments—not the streaming platform.
Of course, music streamers must eventually pay royalties. But they work hard to minimize those payments (hence the above trendline). They have opaque systems that make it hard to figure out the cash flows—and meanwhile manipulate the system with pay-for-play and other schemes.
And don’t think that Spotify is the only culprit. Here are the combined figures for nine streaming platforms (again from Duetti):
The squeeze is getting tighter each year.
Maybe there’s some good news here. That’s because major record labels might finally wake up from their nap.
After all, major labels are losing streaming market share—and it’s getting worse each year.
Here’s the trendline. The direction is clearly downward.
Is the rest of the money going to indie labels? Or to AI and fake artists? Who knows?
But things are so bad at Warner Music that its entire recorded music business is shrinking 15% year-on-year.
They still pretend that they have a loving, caring relationship with Spotify. But that can’t be true, can it?
The news stories don’t tell you much. Warner just cut a new deal with Spotify that “delivers new benefits”—but “financial details weren’t disclosed.”
Universal Music also reached a new agreement with Spotify three weeks ago. Both CEOs made positive comments, but the press release “did not note specific details on the deal’s value or its exact length.”
Meanwhile Spotify has announced that it is “doubling down” on music. I have no idea what that means—but, given what I know about this company, it sounds ominous.
What’s really happening here?
My guess is that record labels are also feeling the squeeze. But they don’t have the courage to fight back.
The most clearcut evidence of what major labels really think can be found in their rapid shift from the recording business to the music publishing business.
If the record business was really booming again, they wouldn’t be doing that.
I’d like to see them take a tougher stance. But I fear the time to do that may have just passed.
Instead of bowing and scraping, they should cut off Spotify and launch their own streaming platform—run as a cooperative of labels and artists.
That’s an actual long term solution, and benefits everybody who loves music. The only losers are the technocrats who are implementing the squeeze.
Alas, the bosses at these labels don’t have the courage for this kind of bold initiative. But they will later regret that they didn’t put up a fight.
Owning the publishing rights to old songs merely delays the inevitable. Over time these songs lose both their popularity and their copyrights. They are, at best, dying assets.
And it will get worse as Spotify and other music streamers learn how to replace human music with AI slop. They are already doing this—and with more success than anyone anticipated.
Unless record labels develop exciting new human talent, they will have no response to these initiatives. Musicians and listeners will both suffer from the resulting creative stagnation.
The situation is so bad that even Spotify’s senior execs are selling their shares. And for good reason—there’s growing evidence that the streaming music audience might now be shrinking.
Even the squeezers are afraid of getting squeezed. That’s how bad it’s gotten.
But I’m not surprised.
You can’t keep serving up old songs, fake artists, and AI slop and expect that the public will get excited about music streaming.
The only real excitement in music now is live performance. People don’t care about records anymore, but they will still talk about Taylor Swift’s tour or the Super Bowl halftime show.
Has any recent album created comparable buzz? If I judge by the Grammy ratings—down again—the public is not engaged by the recording industry. Only 15.4 million people watched this year, although this event once drew 50 million viewers.
That’s not a decline. It’s a total collapse.
This is what cultural stagnation looks like, my friends. And it will get worse, not better—unless something big changes soon.
But how ironic if streaming destroys the record labels. And then ruins the streamers too.
For the time being, subscription prices increases hide the damage done. But they can’t hide it forever. The people who created this mess will eventually pay a price for their carelessness and greed.
And then what happens?
The last people standing might just be the musicians—and, of course, those fans who genuinely care about music. If we’re lucky they will build something new on the ruins.
"Music streamers don’t like creating content (that word, ugh!)." Before I say anything else, let me point out that this is about the 6th time this week that I've seen someone use the word "content" and then immediately bemoan its usage. It's like how people still say "woke (and I hate that term)" or "X, formerly known as Twitter". If you hate the word used in that context, then don't use it. Don't co-opt it and then walk it back. It's "content" when the Spotify execs talk about it, it's "music" when the rest of the world does. OK, onto the real comment...
"The last people standing might just be the musicians" - if one looks really objectively at this, and thinks long-term, there is no "might" about it. Music itself will be with us forever. Precisely which music, and consumed under what model, who knows, but an important distinction here is the difference between music and the music industry. Let's face it, the history of the music industry hasn't exactly been characterized by purity and ethics, the Spotify stuff is just the latest version of it.
Music has always morphed in response to the shenanigans of the music industry. A strike helped kill big bands, electricity made guitars a loud instrument, the constraints of 78's and radio solidified the 3-minute length of songs, etc., etc.
The populace at large is NEVER going back from being able to listen to any piece of music immediately on demand for next to nothing. Despite the prices going up, historically Spotify is still unbelievably cheap for what you get. I'm not defending them at all, but historically, claiming it's outrageous that we can have all the music there is for $17/month instead of $10/month seems rather petty when looked at historically. Same with Amazon and YouTube. Complain all we want, but remember what it used to cost in money and effort and time. These unscrupulous and borderline evil companies are providing their customers with a rather mind-boggling amount of value. Hate them we should for some of their practices, but don't lose sight of the main reasons for their unbridled power.
My own personal prediction is that recorded music as a career will die out mostly. People will still create music for asynchronous consumption, but they won't expect to be paid for it. I myself have earned exactly $180 for my 12 years on Spotify. The way I look at it, it's $180 I wouldn't otherwise have, and I'm pretty certain I would have been making all that music anyway because I love doing it.
I was debating with myself whether I should even bother to offer this long comment... but my very last paragraph here, about having much less disposable income, is really all I needed to say (probably needlessly long, but perhaps a form of my own catharsis, but I'm not a professional writer, and not as succinct as the author... whose work, btw, I always find to be excellent, high quality), to offer my perspective here, since what I’m about to write is not really about all the technical aspects of the music/entertainment business, and instead more of just an overview (and which although may seem like it is unrelated to the theme of the article, I feel is perhaps at the center of the article’s main issue), and since I have never previously commented here, and... I am not a musician, don’t play music… just a lover of it… but then I figured… ah, what the hell… I’ll throw in my two cents.
It seems like everything you've described is something that eventually (underlined/bolded) happens in a societal system based solely upon profit. Maybe there are different types of capitalistic societies of which I'm unaware (and I am certainly not an expert in history, by any means), other than our U.S. version of capitalism-on-steroids. But when we have a system that, for example, allows like eight or so people to control as much wealth as the bottom 50% (and getting far worse... as opposed to improving) that just logically seems like an obvious system that will eventually collapse. And our method of music dissemination (to reach others so we can hear and enjoy it) is just another system within that system that is collapsing.
I know it's like the elephant in the room which we all try not to talk about, to ignore, marginalize... but this is the point in history that our system's marginalization and willful ignorance of this huge issue has brought us to. It's really, the Master issue... the issue that controls, directly or indirectly, the lower-tiered issues, the tier-2 / tier-3 issues that we all get frothed up, foaming at the mouth, about). We’re conditioned, here in this country, to treat, and to only ever think of, our system of capitalism as some type of deity-like figure/ideology/creation when, in fact, all it is is just another scientific method for a group of humans to use to test out, experiment with, in an effort to exist (and hopefully progress) on the planet.
From what I can see, democracy and capitalism are not the same thing (even though we are conditioned to think so here in this country), and I've read plenty of articles where many think the two are actually diametrically opposed. In a system that is supposedly considered a "democracy", you would think that there would be constant discussions in public forums about whether "capitalism" is working out, or is the proper system FOR, or TO ACHIEVE, our goal of “democracy" (the term that we all claim that our country is about, and founded upon). Yeah, I know a few people might correct me, and tell me that this country is actually considered a democratic republic or something like that... but when our own power structure and its public figures are ALWAYS using the term “democracy” as their convenient reason for everything, especially for all the horrible stuff, they do to other humans worldwide (the one used incessantly is, of course... "to spread democracy”) whenever it wants to start aggressions to kill other members of our species around the world for their own nefarious agenda/reasons (which it seems to be doing constantly, especially over the last quarter century or more... but even much further back) then… that IS exactly what everyone really "thinks" we are, that this country is… a "democracy" (most of us are not interested in semantics, or word play)... even though, of course, almost ten years ago, after utilizing decades worth of data, the Princeton University study, Gilens et al, pretty much concluded, that we are actually an oligarchy.
But anyway, the whole point is that most people are getting poorer, comparatively, while only a few are getting richer... which is exactly what one, like an outside observer, would expect to see eventually happen (after perhaps a long time) in this version of capitalism, and this reality has to end up affecting almost everyone... “eventually”… and so we end up with your "Squeeze”. People have much less money to spend on music, and will naturally spend their money first on essentials/necessities, and so this greatly affects big music/entertainment corporations' bottom lines, profits, and so their management then needs to figure out creative ways to balancing their “squeezing” act… the fine line between screwing over the customer and/or the musician… without losing the customer completely)…. and it is apparently become an untenable situation, an almost impossible task.
(…and no… I don’t feel any better, or worse, after writing this… LOL)