u not wrong at all. but the sad truth is when it comes to modern economics theres bigger fish to fry

and remember tours are getting expensive now so artists aren't making as much from tours as they used to (Lorde told us that) so even back when niggas was pirating, tours had a lot more stable money than now.

i gotta keep it a stack!

I'm sayin!

"ay y'all gon get this album whenever i feel like it fr fr"

I guess

Artists are not shelved as much because it's easy to put a project on streaming so I guess some differences

I've been saying this in so many ways, forever. Taking all of music to streaming was never about the artist anyway. It was a way for labels to destroy truly independent acts/companies and gain further control of artist.

I mean there is no way the public will accept music consumption that is not basically free

A small cost per month is the most the vast majority of people will pay for music anymore, you cannot get that cat back in the bag

now they just trapped in deals cause they can never recoup enough

Ding Ding Ding Ding Ding!

artists gotta be some of the most selfless people in the entertainment industry.

"Hey guys, here's this album that I spent the last 2 years of my life working on and spent thousands of dollars crafting together. I'm giving it to you for free on the streaming service of your choice. those streams you give will probably cover the violinists' fee that I had on two tracks but i hope y'all love it, I worked myself to the bone creating it"

This and I used to steal albums from Puff's record shop

Always buy merch and concert tickets though

I heard the Beyonce CDs and vinyl are missing songs which is funny/crazy to me, can’t speak to the other ones. I’m not a huuuuuge fan of the artists listed generally so I kinda view albums like the JT one as the audio equivalent of an airport book store pickup. Like yeah, this should be $5.99 at most and then I throw it out when the flight lands

Also I feel like big-name artists such as those you mentioned selling their entire catalogues to investment firms for a few hundred mill does way more to undervalue music than consumer behavior. People would purchase a lot more music if it were available to them in their budget & if the services they purchased it through didn’t nickel-and-dime them to death. Remember when the iTunes store went from 99 cents per song to $1.50 for “DRM-free” songs that you could actually burn to a CD? That was some bullshit

Hopefully you get a commission if I purchase through this link 🫡

My counterpoint to this is that music is maybe less profitable, but (a) artists never made much off album sales, and (b) music consumption is way up. I’m guessing the two parties really hurt by this are the labels, and smaller artists doing things independently (though I doubt they ever made much off their album sales either).

Before streaming, everyone here downloaded music (4shared, YouTube to MP3, etc) or listened on YouTube. Buying each song you wanna listen digitally (iTunes era) for $0,69-$1,99 was common in the US, Canada and other wealthy countries but it was never a common thing here and most of the world. It’s just not realistic.

Streaming democratized music access

The artist may conceptualize their album as a gift to the public, but really it’s an advertisement to sell tickets and merchandise. They never really made much off album sales.

I’m 25, I remember being around 10 years old and everyone was pirating their music. Before that, I remember my sisters and friends burning music onto CD’s that they liked. Streaming probably reduced a pretty large amount of piracy, along with physical/digital album sales.

I want to push back on the statement that artists never made much off album sales. I don't think that's true at all. Maybe they had bad label deals so they personally never saw much of that money (which sucks) but 1 million sold albums back in the 90s probably meant something HUGE monetarily for that artist that it could never mean today.

Okay but this is the best rap song I've heard in months and he just made it on his porch or w/e for fun

Most music people listen to is major label s***. That s*** is so overvalued.

consequence.net/2022/11/lorde-touring-demented-struggle

Or YouTube

In that now I have infinite options so I’m never sure what to listen to yes

artists aren't even breaking even on sold out tours anymore (and that's probably why we saw a lot of C-level artists overpricing they tickets), what do we have left dawg?