After years of legal battles, the global music industry found success in the war against piracy after forcing stream-ripping site Convert2MP3 to shutter operations.
The war against music piracy rages on in 2019. Despite significant growth for the streaming marketplace, millions of people continue to pirate music as a means of accessing materials for free. Torrents and file-sharing sites such as Mediafire have lost their appeal to pirates in recent years, but they have been replaced by stream-ripping services that allow consumers to steal audio from video clips and convert them into MP3 files. These sites, which often cost nothing to use, are a scourge on the entertainment business.
In 2016, the RIAA, IFPI, and BPI filed legal action against YouTube-MP3, the largest stream ripping site at the time. This case eventually resulted in a settlement in which the site agreed to shut down voluntarily.
Since that time, the music industry and the many groups around the world working to ensure its continued growth, have set their sights on a number of additional websites promoting free stream-ripping services. That included Convert2MP3, which was sued in Germany with backing from the music groups IFPI and BVMI.
Convert2MP3 has been considered one of the most popular stream-ripping destinations online. The site has previously seen tens of millions of people use its service monthly, and that popularity made it a prime target in the music industry’s war against piracy.
The court proceeding surrounding Convert2MP3 has rarely been in the headlines, but that changed earlier this week when Music group IFPI announced that in a combined effort with the German industry group BVMI, it has reached a settlement with the stream-ripping site. The settlement requires the site to shut down immediately and hand over its domain name to IFPI.
The settlement also requires the unnamed person or persons behind Convert2MP3 to pay financial compensation. The amount owed has not been made public.
IFPI’s Chief Executive Frances Moore is pleased with the outcome and hopes that it will motivate other stream-rippers to follow suit.
“Stream ripping is a threat to the entire music ecosystem. Sites such as Convert2MP3 show complete disregard for the rights of artists and record companies and take money away from those creating and investing in music.
“The successful outcome of this case sends a clear signal to other stream ripping sites that they should stop their copyright infringing activities or face legal action,” Moore adds.
Not everyone agrees that these type of sites are by definition copyright-infringing. In a letter to the US Trade Representative, digital rights group EFF previously stressed that there are plenty of legal use cases as well.
“[M]any audio extractions qualify as non-infringing fair uses under copyright. Providing a service that is capable of extracting audio tracks for these lawful purposes is itself lawful, even if some users infringe,” EFF wrote.
EFF has a point. There are instances where stream-ripping does not infringe on a copyright, but those cases are few and far between. The vast majority of stream-ripping use does infringe on others’ intellectual property. Is the risk of losing millions to illegal piracy worth making services like that previously offered by Convert2MP3 free to the public?
Perhaps a better solution would be a third-party service that reviews stream-ripping requests. If not that, maybe consumers wishing to rip audio from videos should pay a fee to do so, thus ensuring any parties owed money have the means to collect.
Stream-ripping is far from being extinguished, and the war on piracy is not likely to end anytime soon. The battle for artists to be compensated for their work has raged for decades, but hopefully, the end of Convert2MP3 pushes a few more pirates toward a legitimate music consumption.
MySpace may not have maintained good backups of the media hosted on their servers, but a community of digital saviors have banded together to share nearly half a million songs previously thought lost forever.
Less than a month after MySpace confirmed the loss of over 50 million songs uploaded to the social media platform between 2003 and 2015, a group of dedicated music fans have delivered the internet a gift. 490,000 songs once hosted by MySpace are now available once more thanks to a community of so-called ‘digital hoarders’ who maintain deep and meticulously curated music libraries.
The ‘Myspace Dragon Hoard (2008-2010)‘ was published on Monday, April 1. The songs included were originally gathered by an anonymous academic study conducted between 2008 and 2010. You can stream the material using this link.
The music collection is arranged by the filenames assigned by MySpace’s Content Delivery Network, the key of which is in the metadata. file in this collection. MD5 and SHA hashes are also provided from the original and included in the main directory. There is no other information about the origin of this collection at this time.
If you’re afraid the material included may disappear again, downloads of the entire collection are available. At over 1.3 terabytes of mp3 files named by the Content Delivery Network of Myspace, this collection can best be described as unwieldy. Therefore, it has been left as a set of ZIP files (created by the Info-ZIP program) that can be browsed and viewed by using the “view content” links in the general item directory.
Paid streaming subscriptions have taken the world by storm, and their increasing domination in the recorded music marketplace is likely to continue.
It’s no surprise that paid streaming subscriptions are on the rise worldwide. Here in the US, a report from the RIAA discovered that paid subscription streaming in the US remained the largest driver of revenue for the American music industry. Their data was backed up by a similar report from the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA), which published its own findings showing that paid streaming revenue has also overtaken physical and download revenue in the UK. The ERA found that 62.1% of all British music revenue last year came from paid subscription streaming. Just 37.9% came from physical sales and digital downloads.
And we cannot forget the British. A recent data dump from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) revealed paid subscription streams accounted for 54% of British labels’ income last year. Revenue from these streams grew 34% over 2017 to £468 million ($614 million). Overall streaming music revenue grew to £516 million ($687 million). Ad-funded streams (Spotify, Deezer, etc.) 25.8% to £19 million ($25 million).
As if all those reports were not enough to confirm paid streaming subscriptions impending rule over the recorded music marketplace, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has released its own report for 2018.
The report, which is available online, reveals that the global recorded music market grew 9.7% year-over-year in 2018 to $19.1 billion, thanks in large part to paid streaming subscriptions (which accounted for 37% of total global revenue). That figure is but more impressive still is the fact that all streaming-related revenue grew 34% year-over-year to $9 billion, accounting for 47% – essentially half – of all global revenue.
The continued growth of streaming revenue helped to offset a 10.1% decline in physical revenue and a 21.2% drop in download revenue. Figures that, if trends hold true, will continue to drop in 2019.
Speaking to the report, IFPI’s Chief Executive Francis Moore explained:
“Last year represented the fourth consecutive year of growth, driven by great music from incredible artists in partnership with talented, passionate people in record companies around the world.
“We continue to work for the respect and recognition of music copyright around the world, and for the resolution of the value gap by establishing a level playing field for negotiating a fair deal for those who create music.
“Above all, we’re working to ensure that music continues its exciting, global journey.”
Artists around the world are continuing to fight for higher royalty rates while asking fans to consider purchasing physical media, but the fact remains that streaming is here to stay. The question is whether or not the companies that provide the services will work with artists to raise their returns or continue to keep mechanical royalties as low as possible.
Consumers are replacing pre-orders with pre-adds and pre-saves, but is something important being lost along the way?
Fast-rising pop sensation Billie Eilish will release her debut record, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, this Friday, but the teenager’s album is already being considered a massive success. Despite not yet being released, the LP has already accrued more than 800,000 pre-adds on Apple Music, which allows users to register to add an album to their streaming collection before it ships, with Eilish setting a new record for the service.
That volume of pre-adds for Eilish’s album is a sign of how the industry is continuing to evolve. Speaking to Music Business Worldwide, Apple Music boss Oliver Schusser said:
“While most services focus the majority of their efforts around playlists, Apple Music still emphasizes albums because we understand their value as a storytelling tool for artists to create context around their music.
To that end, pre-adds are great early indicators of engagement around an artist and the intention of the fans. To actively pre-add an album, much like the pre-order we invented with iTunes, means that the fan is excited about the content and wants to be among the first to enjoy it the moment its available. That kind of engagement is very valuable to an artist and to us.”
Spotify offers a service similar to Apple Music. The company’s pre-save feature allows users to register to have the album added to their library and to receive an alert regarding the content’s availability. The reliability of the notifications depend on how many pre-saves a user registers, but the content is always added as soon as its made available.
While the figures for Eilish’s album are great, pre-adds and pre-saves are not a perfect replacement for pre-orders. Schusser was right to say the numbers can tell a lot about excitement for a release, and they can also help predict initial performance, but the tools currently available to artists through streaming platforms do not provide context about their audience.
If a user pre-saves or pre-adds an album, what does the artist get? Do they know my name? Where I live? My email address? Do they receive anything other than a counter that tells them I am one of the however many people that have decided to request notification of their release becoming available?
Streaming services also do not offer any data that informs artists as to whether or not consumers who pre-save their release actually listen to it.
The real winner in the rising popularity of pre-saves and pre-adds are the streaming services offering them. By using that functionality, consumers are providing the platforms with additional insight into their listening habits. Their actions are strengthening the algorithms that recommend content and create playlists. Whether they know it or not, consumers are strengthening the services they use more than the artists they’re hoping to support.
Still, streaming is here to stay and there is no getting around that fact. If the industry is lucky, Spotify, Apple Music, and similar platforms will make more listener data available to them as time progresses. That seems more likely than a rise in royalty rates based on recent events, but it’s still not going to happen overnight.
Following an appeal to stop mechanical royalty rates from rising, Spotify’s latest bundle threatens to take even more money away from artists.
Spotify made headlines this week by announcing Spotify Premium now includes a free subscription to Hulu’s ad-supported plan. The new perk is available now to new and existing subscribers alike, but not everyone is thrilled with the news.
The streaming giant has been battling a string of negative press since coming out against new royalty rates set by the Copyright Royalty Board (Spotify). Spotify was not alone in appealing the ruling, which plans to raise mechanical royalty rates by 44% over the next four years, but the company made matters worse for itself after posting a blog in defense of their decision.
“Does Spotify think songwriters deserve to be paid more?” the post asks. “Yes — this is important to songwriters and it’s important to Spotify. The industry needs to continue evolving to ensure that the people who create the music we all love — artists and songwriters — can earn a living. The question is how best to achieve that goal.”
As we covered last week, the new CRB ruling aims to raise the value of a song from $0.003 per stream to $0.004, but Amazon, Spotify, Pandora, and Google disagree.
In its blog post, Spotify said it is generally supportive of a 15 percent rate, provided the rates cover what it calls the “right scope of publishing rights,” including those for videos and lyrics. Spotify argues that the CRB’s decision limits the type of non-music offerings it can present to potential subscribers.
“A key area of focus in our appeal will be the fact that the CRB’s decision makes it very difficult for music services to offer ‘bundles’ of music and non-music offerings,” the company said. “This will hurt consumers who will lose access to them. These bundles are key to attracting first-time music subscribers so we can keep growing the revenue pie for everyone.”
The music industry, however, is not buying Spotify’s claims.
David Israelite, the CEO president of the National Music Publishers Association, cut straight to the chase on Twitter by saying that it was a “big mistake” for Spotify to “try to deceive songwriters and artists” with the blog post.
In its blog post, Spotify said it is generally supportive of a 15 percent rate, provided the rates cover what it calls the “right scope of publishing rights,” including those for videos and lyrics. Spotify argues that the CRB’s decision limits the type of non-music offerings it can present to potential subscribers.
“A key area of focus in our appeal will be the fact that the CRB’s decision makes it very difficult for music services to offer ‘bundles’ of music and non-music offerings,” the company said. “This will hurt consumers who will lose access to them. These bundles are key to attracting first-time music subscribers so we can keep growing the revenue pie for everyone.”
Many in the music industry were quick to argue against the company’s claims. David Israelite, the CEO president of the National Music Publishers Association, said on Twitter that it was a “big mistake” for Spotify to “try to deceive songwriters and artists” with the blog post.
“I didn’t think Spotify could sink much lower — but they have,” he said. “This statement is one giant lie. I’m sure a PR team spent a great deal of time and energy crafting a statement to try to deceive artists and songwriters. They must think artists and songwriters are stupid. They are not. The CRB ordered a rate increase for songwriters. Spotify is against it. It really is that simple.”
Songwriters of North America (SONA) seconded Israelite’s comments by saying that Spotify, along with Amazon, Pandora and Google, who are also appealing the CRB rates, are clearly in the wrong.
— Songwriters of North America (@wearesonaLA) March 12, 2019
While it’s easy to appreciate the allure of Spotify’s Hulu bundle, it’s also hard to ignore the fact that offering more for less ultimately comes with a price. If Spotify is charging consumers the same amount for its service while offering access to another service altogether the money being spent will inevitably be split between those entities. Whatever share Spotify takes will then be split between the company and the artists who rely on its platform to get their music to consumers.
Spotify may have a point in its argument against the ruling, but the company may also have ulterior motives for wanting to keep mechanical royalty rates low. Musicians don’t care if consumers get access to Hulu with their Spotify account. Some may even argue artists are against it, as it provides more programming that distracts consumers from listening to music.
It’s clear the battle for mechanical royalties is far from over. Right now, consumers seem to care about the needs of their favorite musicians, but will the promise of cheaper streaming solutions be too good for them to resist? Only time will tell.
Will Spotify’s latest marketing ploy boost its subscriber count as Apple Music’s popularity continues to rise?
Spotify Premium now includes a free subscription to Hulu’s ad-supported plan. That perk goes into effect today, and it is available to new and existing users of Spotify’s Premium streaming service in the US.
The announcement marks the latest bundling collaboration between the two streaming giants in recent years. In 2017, Spotify introduced a plan for university students priced at $4.99 a month. The subscription included ad-free access to Spotify’s entire catalog, as well as access to Hulu’s limited commercial plan.
To take advantage of the offer, new Spotify users can sign up now. Once joined head over to the “Your Services” page within account settings and activate your Hulu subscription. If you already get Hulu through Spotify, you won’t have to do anything to start saving an extra $3 per month. On the other hand, if you subscribe to Hulu and don’t yet have a Spotify account, you’ll need to cancel your billing through Hulu, then set it up through Spotify to receive the discount.
Unlike the $4.99 Student Plan, which bundles Hulu’s limited commercial plan, plus the Showtime channel alongside the music streaming service, its new promotion doesn’t include any other free extras. The new deal does not allow subscribers to add additional services to their plan, which means those who access Hulu through Spotify will need to find another way to enjoy Game Of Thrones and Billions in the months ahead.
The timing of Spotify’s new offer could not be better for the company, who has spent the past week embroiled in controversy after taking a stance against raising the royalty rate it pays artists. The deal also reveals yet another way the streaming company hopes to combat the rising popularity of Apple Music, which has been growing its premium subscribe count at an alarming rate in recent months.
The latest report from the Recording Industry Association of America shows consumer interest in premium streaming music subscriptions is on the rise.
Numbers can be deceiving. When asked to discuss their growth, streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music will often quote their global user statistics instead of those related to a specific country or continent. That isn’t necessarily wrong by any means, but it can lead consumers and investors alike to perceive a company’s standing in a different light.
In January, Spotify announced it now welcomed over 200 million users every month. That figure, which refers to the platform’s total global user count, included 96 million paying premium subscribers. No further details were given related to where paying subscriptions came from, nor has any similar information been provided to the media since.
A new report from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has shed a bit more light on the streaming market. According to the study, 50 million US consumers paid for streaming music services in 2018. Use of such platforms rose 33% over 2017’s numbers, and it’s likely to grow further still in 2019.
“Tremendous output from the artist community fueled a historic milestone of 50 million subscriptions to music services, which in turn helped drive U.S. music’s third consecutive year of double-digit growth,” RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier said in a statement.
“Rejuvenation in the industry means more opportunities to find and break new artists for fans to enjoy,” Glazier said.
Additional data found in the report reveals that 75% of music industry revenue now comes from various forms of streaming. Physical sales of vinyl records continued to increase, up 8% to $419 million, the highest level since 1988.
Unfortunately, other forms of physical media were not as successful. Revenue from CD sales are down almost 34%, to $698 million; music video sales fell more than 28%, to $28 million; and sales of “other physical media,” including cassette tapes, was off nearly 22%, to $9.6 million.
Total music revenue for 2018 totaled just under $10 billion — a significant recovery from the low of $6.7 billion in both 2014 and 2015 — but the industry is only back to a level close to what it was in 2007 when the total was $10.7 billion.
The RIAA did not comment on how the rising popularity of streaming services is impacting the lives of artists. The most popular performers have reported big earning from Spotify and the like, but many smaller and mid-size artists have found it harder to rely on recorded music to pay their bills.
Regardless, it appears the streaming boom will continue for the foreseeable future. Follow HaulixDaily on Facebook and Twitter for more industry news and insight.
Who is paying for music? According to a new report from the UK, almost everyone.
A new study released by the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA), a UK trade association, claims that the number of paid streaming music subscriptions will soon overtake the number of people accessing the same services for free.
The report, which was released on February 5, surveyed usage of Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Deezer, and YouTube Music, among others. The trade association found that more males already pay to stream (24.3%) rather than for free (23.9%), and more 25-34 year-olds also choose paid-for (34.9%) than free (27.9%). By a narrower margin, the same is now also true for 35-44s and 45-54s. You can view a full table of insights below. For women, more chose to stream music for free (19.1%) instead of paying to stream (16.8%).
For the time being, more people still stream for free (21.5%) rather than pay (20.6%), but the current conversation rates indicate a victory for paid-for services could come later this year.
Speaking on the results of the study, ERA CEO Kim Bayley said, “Ten or fifteen years ago popular opinion had it that it was all over for the music business and people would no longer pay for music. These figures are a striking vindication of the innovation and investment of digital services.
She added, “What is all the more remarkable is that the likes of Spotify and YouTube also offer fantastic free services, funded by advertising. These figures suggest that music fans increasingly believe that the added features offered by paid-for services, and the curation which enables them to navigate literally millions of tracks, are definitely worth the money.”
The ERA based its data on their recurring entertainment survey which every quarter for the past five years has quizzed a panel of 1,500 people on how they consume music video and games, tracking changing service and format preferences.
The internet has ruined our already short attention spans.
In the early days of entertainment, consumers were likely to try anything at least once. New artist? Let’s hear their single. New sound? Let’s see how this compares to what worked in the past.
Today’s consumer is far more fickle, but that didn’t happen overnight. As media has grown, so has the number of options consumers have at any given moment. In 2018, anyone can watch or listen to virtually anything with just a few clicks. From free content to streaming services and (unfortunately) pirate sites, nearly all entertainment ever produced is available at all times all over the world.
With that in mind, who has time for the unfamiliar?
Music blogger Paul Lamere analyzed billions of plays from millions of Spotify listeners all over the world to discover their skip rates. Here’s what he found:
24.14 percent likelihood of skipping to the next song in the first 5 seconds.
28.97 percent in the first 10 seconds
35.05 percent in the first 30 seconds
48.6 percent skip before the song finishes
Digging further, Lamere found that the average listener skips 14.65 times per hour, or about once every four minutes. Females skip slightly more than males at 45.23% to 44.75%.
The mobile skip rate is 51.1% while on a desktop it’s 40.1%. That data suggests that desktop listening is a background activity, something used to fill the void of silence, which makes sense. Most of us listen to music while working, and most of us have a very particular preference when it comes to what sounds help us work best.
Lamere also discovered some interesting correlations between age and skip rates. Teenagers, who are notorious for their short attention spans, skip more than 50% of the tracks they hear. Adults, on the other hand, skip about 35% of the material.
Weekend skip rates are higher than those during the week, which is due at least in part to fewer people listening via desktop. People know what they want to hear on the weekend because they’re often trying to create a mood to accompany a specific activity. Once an attitude or style is identified, skipping anything that doesn’t fit that desired consistency is second nature.
The big takeaway here (and most obvious), is that grabbing the attention of listeners is harder than ever. Artists need to catch us right away if they have any chance of gaining fans, especially if they’re hoping to target a younger demographic.
The following opinion piece was written by Haulix Digital Marketing Coordinator James Shotwell. We’d love to hear your opinion on this piece, so once you finish reading head over to Twitter and tell us what you think.
Before I dive too deep into this piece I want to stress that I am a huge supporter of streaming services in general. The age of streaming has made it possible for artists at every level to continue making money on older releases long after consumer interest in purchasing those titles has been depleted. We can argue all day about whether or not the royalty rate is acceptable (it’s not), but that is another conversation for another. Streaming provides a steady stream of income for artists even when they have nothing new to promote, which in turn makes it possible for more artists to continue creating even when their latest release is less than well received by the general public.
Okay? Okay.
The more I think about the digital age and how it has impacted the entertainment industry as a whole the more I realize that the film industry may have handled the war against piracy far better than those working in music. Unless a film is being released on VOD (video on demand), those interested in seeing a new title still have to buy a ticket and visit a theater in order to experience the film immediately following its release. Those who are not willing to do that must wait for the film to hit VOD (usually three months after a theatrical debut) or wait for the title to be made available on streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime (which typically happens six-nine months after the theatrical debut). Some may choose to pirate the film before that happens, but if they do their only viewing option is a significantly lower quality product, often captured by handycam or similar home video recording device.
This is not the case with music. Aside from a very select number of releases, every new album is made available on streaming services and in stores at the exact same time. More often than not, full streams of new releases hit the internet days before an album goes on sale, so even if you bought a copy through pre-order you are able to access the music as the same time as everyone who didn’t bother to support the artist in question. As long as you have access to YouTube you can more than likely hear a new release in full 2-3 days before it’s available for sale, and if you have an account through Spotify, Tidal, or AppleMusic you can hear the vast majority of all music ever made available in the digital format for less than the cost of one album in stores.
This is a long way of saying new release streaming on release day is a bad recipe for financial success. The ease of access does not raise the value of a product in the streaming age, it diminishes it. Why should consumers even consider paying $10 for an album they can essentially access for free? If I pay $10 a month for a streaming service and stream at least 1000 songs each month that means each song stream cost me one cent. As we already know, artists do not receive even a penny per stream, so the actual value of each song played is less than a cent. Add offline streaming to the mix, which is the equivalent to downloading an mp3 onto your computer or mobile device, and you’ve basically got an endless supply of digital albums at your disposal whenever you need them.
One could argue that cost to produce a movie is far greater than the cost of producing an album, which justifies the need to push direct sales and rentals longer than music, but cost of production matters very little in this situation. No artist or record label releases music hoping to make just enough money to cover the cost of production. Artists and their labels want to make as much money as possible, and I believe they may be selling themselves short by rushing to streaming services on release day.
If you think about it, the promotional efforts for new movies and new albums are basically the same across the board. A trailer for a film is like a music video or single for an album. Filmmakers and actors do interviews to build awareness for their upcoming release just like musicians. Stills from the movie are like promo photos for an artist or group. Posters are album covers. The difference is, when release day comes you still have to go to a theater to see the film. It’s not available on your phone as soon as you wake up unless it’s purchased in advance on a VOD platform. Your excitement for a new film may been building for weeks or months, just like it would for new music music, but on release day there is still a barrier to entry because studios understand those who really want the product are still willing pay for it. Those who are not as excited will wait for the cost to decrease or for the title to hit streaming platforms. Some will pirate the material, sure, but those people were never likely to buy a ticket or purchase the film in the first place.
If I had to pinpoint where music went wrong I would wager it happened somewhere around the dawn of the new millennium. Napster targeted music long before film piracy was a hot topic, and no one really knew how to respond. The music industry panicked, and soon the powers that be decided that the best way to fight piracy was to give everything away themselves in hopes of controlling the conversation. Their reasoning in this action was sound at the time: If labels and artists control how people access free content they can directly interact with and market to fans that are eager to hear the material.
As time carried on however, the ability to control the conversation by granting immediate/advance access began to shrink. Streams went from being hosted on an artist’s website to being available through third party platforms like Soundcloud and YouTube, which in turn made the material embeddable for anyone with a website. As you can guess, and as we now know thanks to numerous studies, this approach didn’t really solve anything except how easy it was for people to access music. According to a 2015 report from Cisco, music piracy is currently 48% worse than it was in 2008, and it’s expected to double by 2020.
A great example of immediate streaming hindering the sales potential of a record can be found by examining the rollout of Kanye West’s latest release, The Life Of Pablo. The album, which allegedly received 250 million streams during in its first week of availability in February 2016, was released exclusively through Tidal without an option for fans to buy the record. This lead to a surge in Tidal signups, which in turn garnered a good deal of press for the platform, but it also lead to a surge in music piracy. According to a report from TorrentFreak, a rip of the The Life Of Pablo was pirated through torrent sites more than half a million times in that same first week. This does not take into account direct downloads of the pirated album – AKA downloads from services like ZippyShare or MediaFire – which would likely place the number of stolen copies closer to, if not above, one million in a single week.
The Life Of Pablo was eventually made available for download on April 1 for $20. The album moved the equivalent to 90,000 units and hit number one on Billboard with more than half of its ‘sales’ being generated by streaming equivalent albums. That means Kanye actually sold, at most, around 40,000 downloads. Compared to the 327,000 first week album sales (pure album sales, no streaming) of his previous release, Yeezus, this is a dramatic 87% slide in first week sales. Furthermore, The Life Of Pablo has not sold more than 1000 downloads in a single week since its second week of availability, which puts Kanye’s total pure sales for this release to date (May 31, 2016) around 55,000 or less.
Kanye is not the only one covering low actual sales with big streaming numbers. The rate of streams is impressive, but the payout most likely is far lower than the total that could have been made from actual album sales. With this in mind, I posit that streaming’s impact on overall sales would be much lower if new releases didn’t hit streaming platform for a month(+) after their initial release. We cannot undo the last decade of content being made available instantaneously, largely for free, overnight, but we can adjust our release efforts moving forward in hopes of creating greater demand for downloads and physical product.
Some believe people are not willing to buy albums anymore because they do not want to risk purchasing something they might not like, but again that is exactly what happens in the world of film. Trailers for new movies can be very misleading, and we’ve all been fooled by a good trailer for a bad movie. Still, consumers spend billions of dollars every year to see new titles of all sizes in theaters or on demand. One could also argue the risk is even greater with film, as most ticket prices – especially for 3D films – are far higher than the cost of a record and they only allow for a single viewing/entertainment experience. Downloads and physical sales allow consumers to spend time with material, and more often than not repeated plays of a record have a tendency to change people’s views of the material.
Fans who are unwilling or unable to purchase an album outright can and will wait for the record to be available on a subscription platform. What artists and labels alike need to do is create demand up front, push sales hard for a short period, then – only after the core buying market has been depleted – make the content available everywhere. Once your product is a click away, especially at little to no cost to the consumer, you’re forever fighting an uphill battle for sales where consumers win far more often than content creators.
James Shotwell is the Digital Marketing Manager for Haulix. He is also a professional entertainment critic, covering both film and music, as well as the co-founder of Antique Records. Feel free to tell him you love or hate the article above by connecting with him on Twitter. Bonus points if you introduce yourself by sharing your favorite Simpsons character.
