> Oh poor, poor Sony/BMG/EMI CEOs who absolutely couldn't buy another yacht while lowering their expenses by literally making money out of thin air by literally copying digital music. /me wets a handkerchief with the tears of compassion.
You are conveniently ignoring the musicians which are hardest hit by our piracy. They make hardly any money from Spotify.
> You would see what by 2017 the revenue is on par with 1981.
Apart from 1981 pretty much coinciding with the cassette piracy decline, you are also ignoring the fact that the world economy has grown massively since 1981. Saying there was no decline in revenue is like comparing car revenue from 1981 with car revenue today and claim the natural state of things for them is to be the same. The comparison is absurd.
> What happened in 2001-2008 what returned the revenue to almost 1981 levels?
Piracy. CDs initially prevented piracy. Then CD sales collapsed because of piracy. Napster & Co.
> People tasted how it can be to have multiple albums (and with HDD players - your whole library) on a small, compact device
That was possible with the iPod and other MP3 players together with legally acquired downloadable music. But the revenue never returned to CD levels because most people kept pirating. Then Spotify came with extremely low pricing and forced musicians to accept ruinous streaming revenues, because Spotify had to compete against piracy. That's why music revenue has collapsed.
No, from Spotify. You aren't paying enough for it. Because you would switch to illegal downloads otherwise. It is hard to offer a successful product when it has to compete against a completely free alternative.
Yikes! You can't flame like this on HN, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
You broke the site guidelines egregiously in this thread. We have to ban accounts that do that. Fortunately you've also posted quite a few good comments, so this shouldn't be hard to fix, but if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.
> Bullshit. You are conveniently ignoring the musicians were ripped by the labels way, way before mp3s and still are. Go, read this[0] from the musician itself, ffs.
Piracy doesn't make this issue smaller, if anything, it makes it worse. Love wrote:
> There were a billion music downloads last year, but music sales are up. Where's the evidence that downloads hurt business?
This piece was published in 2000, and sales were not "up". Maybe he didn't have access to the latest figures. But they already started to go down. Over the next few years, CD sales would collapse completely, and digital music sales would not nearly make up for it. I posted the charts previously.
> > Apart from 1981 pretty much coinciding with the cassette piracy decline
> LOLWUT?
I posted the chart previously. Around that time vinyl records had declined substantially, without cassette sales compensating for it. The most likely explanation is that cassette piracy was the culprit. CDs fixed this problem for a while, as they were initially read only and couldn't be pirated.
> > Then CD sales collapsed because of piracy. Napster & Co.
> Are you fucking serious? Napster became defunct by 2001. iPod came out in late 2001, iRiver came out in 2002 and iPod 3 in 2003. By 2005 NOBODY used CDs as a means for portable music.
Yes, because Napster was replaced with countless other music piracy apps. Gnutella, eDonkey2000, Kazaa, Limewire etc. People could legally buy music for their iPods, but they were rather using filesharing. This was free after all, if illegal.
> > Do you have troubles with comprehension? You could never return to 'CD levels' because those levels literally had profit margins anywhere from 200% to 3000%:
> > In 1995, material costs were 30 cents for the jewel case and 10 to 15 cents for the CD. The wholesale cost of CDs was $0.75 to $1.15, while the typical retail price of a prerecorded music CD was $16.98
That's a nonsense comparison. Raw CD manufacturing costs have almost nothing to do with the price or value of music. With downloadable music, the "manufacturing cost" of transferring a few megabytes is likewise miniscule. But the fixed cost of making and advertising the music is not meaningfully different.
> And also you conveniently ignore what the physical media declined past 2001 precisely because people no longer needed nor wanted the physical media.
And you are conveniently ignoring the fact that legal CD music got replaced with illegally downloaded music. I posted the chart. Hardly anyone paid for downloaded music.
> Can you explain how come the label receives 27% while the artist only 16%?
Bad contracts have nothing to do with piracy, but the extremely low price of Spotify has. That Spotify and Apple Music are cheap doesn't mean that artists get a bigger share of the total revenue than in the past. But the total revenue itself got smaller.
You are conveniently ignoring the musicians which are hardest hit by our piracy. They make hardly any money from Spotify.
> You would see what by 2017 the revenue is on par with 1981.
Apart from 1981 pretty much coinciding with the cassette piracy decline, you are also ignoring the fact that the world economy has grown massively since 1981. Saying there was no decline in revenue is like comparing car revenue from 1981 with car revenue today and claim the natural state of things for them is to be the same. The comparison is absurd.
> What happened in 2001-2008 what returned the revenue to almost 1981 levels?
Piracy. CDs initially prevented piracy. Then CD sales collapsed because of piracy. Napster & Co.
> People tasted how it can be to have multiple albums (and with HDD players - your whole library) on a small, compact device
That was possible with the iPod and other MP3 players together with legally acquired downloadable music. But the revenue never returned to CD levels because most people kept pirating. Then Spotify came with extremely low pricing and forced musicians to accept ruinous streaming revenues, because Spotify had to compete against piracy. That's why music revenue has collapsed.