After learning about the Music Industry through course lecture and through the IFPI report, I believe that the future of the music industry is shifting to paid music streaming services and artists being signed to a record label.
Paid streaming service revenues more than doubled in 2018 and the global recorded music market grew by 9.7%. Services such as Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora, Soundcloud, etc. are dominating the music streaming industry because of their mobile app accessibility across the globe. In the IFPI, we see how these paid streaming services are affecting the international regions with Asia & Australia increasing by 11.7%, Latin America increasing by 16.8%, and North America increasing by 14%. I predict that these numbers are only going to increase over the years as well as the expansion in the foreign market. Currently foreign countries love streaming American music but with the growth of paid streaming services, I believe that foreign artists and their market will increase as well. “Digital revenues grew by 21.1% to US$11.2 billion in 2018, crossing the US$10 billion mark for the first time ever and now accounting for 58.9% of total recorded music revenues. This growth was predominantly driven by a 32.9% rise in paid streaming, that now accounts for 37.0% of total revenue.”(IFPI).
Record labels provide artists with a mass amount of support and resources. Record label benefits include the following: A&R, Creative Teams, Marketing & Digital, Sync & Partnership, Press & Publicity, Global Distribution, and Global Reach. Artists now have a team full of support, but not one that supports their income. In class lecture we learned that artists make such a small amount of money from streams. The revenue is split between multiple parties involved in the song such as songwriter, label, producer, engineer, and the artist. Spotify credits artist a revenue of something around $0.0004 a stream. Record labels are the best to get an artist’s music out but are they really the best to make money with?
Daniel Bender 