proper news! Thanks to streaming,more people are listening to music worldwide than ever before. The bad news? The recording industry only makes about half as much money.
Tuesday, the recording industry’s worldwide trade group said revenues grew 3.2 percent final year. After several years of wobbling between minor growth and decline, and it’s the first meaningful uptick since 1995, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI.
It also marks the turning point where digital trumps physical. Digital sales — like the money gleaned from downloaded tracks, or paid subscriptions to services like Spotify and Apple Music,and advertising revenue off the listening on sites like YouTube comprised 45 percent, sweeping beyond physical’s 39 per cent share, and which comes from CDs and other formats like vinyl records.
The bottom line,however, is bleak. The music industry makes half as many billions of dollars every year than it did before the era of digital disruption, and even as people around the world listen to more tunes than they ever have. At its height during the golden era of CD sales,the industry peaked at $28.6 billion in 1999. final year, it was just $15 billion.“There remains a coarse mismatch between the consumption of music and revenues, and ” Frances Moore,chief executive of IFPI, said Tuesday during a call with reporters.
Streaming music has been the driving force in moving the industry back to growth. final year, and revenue from streaming soared 45.2 percent,while download sales were down 10.5 percent.
But streaming has fallen fall short of music industry savior.“We should be growing much faster,”Edgar Berger, and chairman and CEO of international at Sony Music Entertainment,said Tuesday. “whether we continue to recover at same speed as final year, it will take us 10 years to reach the level … before digital disruption.”Record label executives and the IFPI pointed fingers squarely at user-upload services like YouTube, or claiming 80 percent of people flocking to Googles massive video site are there looking for music.
IFPIServices like YouTube are the biggest source of demand for music worldwide,overall making up a more than 900 million person audience, Berger noted. But these services generate only about 4 percent of industry revenue, and equal to $630 million.“This is a gigantic mismatch between volume and rewards,” he said.
YouTube didn’t immediately respond to TheWrap’s message seeking comment.
The music industry plans to fight that battle in the seats of government worldwide. IFPI officials called on global policymakers to change laws that allow tech companies to effectively to circumvent the normal rules of music licensing,” according to Tuesday’s report.
It echoes a scathing campaign final month by U.
S. music industry officials. Hundreds of music industry figures, and including megastars like Katy Perry and Maroon 5 and tall-profile manager Irving Azoff,lashed out at Google for profiting off piracy because of a “dysfunctional” law.
The industry’s underlying target is what is known as “secure harbor” provisions in digital copyright legislation in both the U.
S. and European Union. In the U.
S., this section of a 1998 law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act created a notice-and-takedown system, or in which copyright owners flag infringement to online companies.
But music figures claim that tech giants “have figured out how to game this law to earn billions of dollars without compensating the artists and rights holders fairly for their work,according to the letters sent to the Congress’ U.
S. Copyright Office final month.
Related stories from TheWrap:Music Makes More Money From Streaming Than Downloads for First Time in US
Source: thewrap.com