Music industry – One step closer to being accurate
It’s time to welcome the IFPI Global Top 10 Albums of 2018! It’s a good ol’ list, focusing on pure album sales. This atypical methodology leads to the most unique list ever by the IFPI since they debuted them in 2001 with soundtracks and foreign language releases all over the ranking!
The Recording Industry Association of America, better known by their RIAA acronym, has published their much anticipated 2018 Shipment & Revenue Statistics. The main conclusion? Streaming is no longer a utopia but instead a true game changing actor. In fact, the US music industry, despite the collapse of sales formats, exploded by over 40% since 2015 to reach revenues of $9.8 billion.
We love stories of books and movies. We also love music. What about telling the story of the music industry then? Studying history is a key factor of success for upcoming challenges. The industry of music has been going through ups and downs for over 150 years, but we hardly know a thing about it. Get to know it all from the first origins of the music industry to worthy insights about streaming. Incredibly enough, you will see that everything that is changing now was one way or another already written in the past.
For many years, I studied the recording music industry while living in France. During that time, it was frustrating to see charts, certifications and industry data about the same two dozens of countries again and again. I couldn’t help but wonder why so many countries were left out of official reports. Now that I live in Africa, I have been able to collect enough information to View More
I know you wonder what you are doing here. If you will change your behavior, that’s most likely not me who’s going to tell you that. Well, I still will. Choices do not need to be conscious to happen. Streaming creates different dynamics, a different way to live music experiences. When deciding which artist you go after, your choice may not be the same if you are on a retailer or logged into Spotify. View More
Living species always need to adapt to their context in order to survive. For businesses, the situation is no different. As streaming is fully changing the music industry, its actors, both the labels as well as the artists need to update their way of building their careers in order to stay relevant. Which adjustments do they need to do? Can all artists react positively or are some of them poised to fallinto obscurity?
As we pointed out inside the first part of this set of 3 articles, the Media which links the music industry to the general public, is fast transitioning from View More
Streaming is organically increasing. When I first wrote The Music Industry, an infinite journey way back in early 2014 I concluded the study with the chapter titled The Future, which determined how the industry would be by 2020. One section in that article covered Streaming vs Downloads, the War is open. In fact, for most people it was still unclear that streaming was going to take over from downloads – let alone physical sales. Half-way between 2014 and 2020, there is no doubt anymore about streaming dominating the industry. Plenty of questions remain though. View More
Not all elements can face the test of time the same way. Some will get erased within’ seconds, others will last forever. This samelogic perfectly applies to our favorite music tunes. As a music industry watcher, one of the most appreciated functionality of streaming is that we can check results of pretty much every single track from all artists, enabling in-depth analysis of various categories.
This includes analyzing which hits from certain periods remained the most relevant nowadays and which ones got View More
When something dies down, there are two ways to feel about it – Rest In Peace or Good Riddance. The choice is easy while speaking about the music industry-killer from iTunes, legal downloads. They downgraded way more physical sales than they were worth by themselves. It raised many questions, such as how many copies would Rihanna‘s Good Girl Gone Bad or Katy Perry‘s Teenage Dream have sold View More
Not all elements can face the test of time the same way. Some will get erased within’ seconds, others will last forever. This same View More