It’s broadly accepted that recorded music simply doesn’t make money these days. If you want to make a living as an artist, get ready for a punishing touring schedule, unless you’re Adele, who’s seemingly the only artist still capable of selling CDs.
But despite all the Chicken Littles running around penning jeremiads about the end of civilisation as we know it, new wholesale figures from ARIA have shown something rather surprising: the Australian music industry’s revenues have actually risen.
As ABC News reports, the first increase in music industry revenues in three years is largely thanks to more music lovers subscribing to streaming services, which presently account for 62 percent of the overall music market, as digital and physical sales continue to decline.
What’s perhaps most surprising, however, is that digital downloads declined by almost 13 percent, whilst CD sales fell just four percent, a slower decline than the 18 percent in 2013. This seems to suggest that streaming is cannibalising digital sales before CD sales.
It’s possible that consumers are opting to stream when looking for the album in a digital format, meanwhile opting to spend their money on a physical copy of the album in lieu of having one that can only be stored on an iPod or computer hard drive.
If this trend continues, the CD could actually outlast the MP3 as a music format. Speaking of dead music formats, vinyl sales increased by 38 per cent in 2015, suggesting the vinyl revival is still going strong but may have already reached its peak.
But whilst streaming companies are enjoying record revenues (last year saw the value of the Aussie industry double from $23 million to $46 million), little of that revenue is finding its way back to the artists who are generating the content the services sell.
“Even if it’s a tiny royalty, it’s probably better than people just downloading it for free,” Palms frontman Al Grigg told the ABC. According to a report by Death and Taxes, Spotify give artists a payout of just $0.00521 per song stream.
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“More people are hearing the band, and maybe then more people are liking the band, and they will buy a ticket and come and see you play live or they might buy a T-shirt, and then you are making your money that way,” said Grigg.
Dan Nevin of Australian independent labels body AIR said the industry will get to a point where streaming revenue will overtake that of CDs and digital in their heyday, but insisted “we are quite a way off that”. In the meantime, bands will struggle to make minimum wage.
ARIA’s figures, which showed a five percent total increase in industry revenue, come just a month after a US report revealed streaming had generated more money than record sales for the first time ever.
