La IA podría reinar y lastimar a creadores de música en España, dice nuevo estudio
When I came to Billboard in January 2019, the U.S. recorded music business had just gone through its third year in a row of growth. After hitting a low point of about $7 billion in 2014 and 2015 — about half of its 1999 peak — U.S. recorded music revenue in 2018 rose 12% to $9.8 billion, three quarters of that from streaming. The number of paid music streaming subscriptions in the U.S. hit 50 million. Vinyl brought in $419 million. Call it a comeback.
After seven years here as a deputy editor and then a columnist, Feb. 27 will be my last day and this will be my last column. I’ve seen a million faces and I’ve rocked them all — plus covered enough intellectual property litigation to know that it’s legally safer to quote that lyric if I point out that it’s commentary. I saw the music business return to health, boom and begin to navigate its next set of challenges. (Before you ask, I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing next, but stay in touch.)
As of 2024, the last full year for which information is available, the U.S. recorded music business is worth $17.7 billion, 84% of which comes from streaming, including more than 100 million paid subscriptions. Vinyl alone accounted for $1.4 billion, which would have been a fifth of the entire business in 2018. The publishing business is thriving, the live sector is booming and music rights are becoming a recognized investment vehicle.
If things are so good, though, why do so many music creators and executives feel so bad? Over the past two years, the major labels have gone through rounds of layoffs. A flood of AI content threatens streaming royalties. And the high margins that labels traditionally generated are now threatened by new distribution companies — including those owned by the labels themselves. Should I have called this column “We’ve Only Just Begun” or “Where Have All the Good Times Gone?” The only things I know for sure are that seven years from now my colleague Ed Christman will still be the sharpest journalist covering the industry and no one in it will have done anything worthwhile with the blockchain. But here are some reasons to be upbeat — and downcast — about where the music business is going.
So far, AI music has been more about litigation and consternation than value generation. But last year, two of the three major labels signed licensing deals with generative AI companies that represent an important initial step toward making this a business that helps creators and rightsholders. How exactly this will work in practice is still unclear — deals are necessary, but not sufficient. But now that various stakeholders know that there’s going to be licensing revenue, they can begin to argue over it.
We Are the World
Over the past seven years, global recorded music revenue grew from $17.3 billion in 2018 to $29.6 billion in 2024, the last year for which data is available, according to IFPI. Some of that revenue now comes from countries that barely generated any revenue in 1999. The same is happening with publishing royalties. When it comes to artists, more talent than ever is crossing borders, and creators working in genres like K-pop and regional Mexican music are scoring global hits. The U.S., Japan and Europe remain the biggest music markets, but countries like South Korea, Mexico and Brazil are more important than ever. That trend will continue.
Let’s Get Physical
For more than a decade, Very Serious People have been saying that the music business is driven by streaming — which it is. But global revenue from vinyl sales has grown for 18 years, and the format now generates almost 10 times the revenue of the entire recorded music business in the Middle East and North Africa, according to IFPI. (It’s almost certainly less profitable, but that’s hard to know for sure.) A couple of years ago, I was told that revenue from vinyl “isn’t as important,” which is either too smart for me to understand or pretty stupid. Vinyl sales are leveling off, but a new wave of pricey audiophile products will continue to drive growth. So, in a much more modest way, will I.
Memory of a Free Festival
For much of the last decade, the live concert business in the U.S. was dominated by festivals, which is fantastic if you like seeing artists while standing in a field. For those of us who prefer venues better suited to music, it’s good news that single-artist concerts are making a comeback. Partly, this is because these shows, often events in their own right, can be more lucrative. But it’s also because festivals that once prized their differences — from hipster Coachella to hippie-leaning Bonnaroo — started to book a lot of the same acts. Festivals aren’t going anywhere; they will remain an important part of the live business, as they should. But it’s nice to have more variety, as well as more seats.
For all its cultural and financial importance, music streaming can still be a bit wonky — focused on the mainstream and weak on discovery, without much context. If you like relatively mainstream music — pop, rock, hip-hop, country, Latin — the big streaming services work really well. But if you like jazz or reggae or old country, they’re still just not organized very well — quartets and quintets led by the same musician are considered completely different artists, albums recorded by artists under pseudonyms are listed separately and nothing is cross-indexed in a useful way. I wish that just a bit of the work and wealth that goes into buying and marketing catalogs could be devoted to the basics.
Mo Money, Mo Problems
The live music business has never been better — or, in some ways, more fragile. Concert ticket prices have risen to the point where they are unaffordable for many people. I don’t consider this a moral issue and I’m not sure the government needs to get involved, except to ensure that the market of promoters remains competitive. At the same time, pop concerts have almost always been affordable for teenagers and twentysomethings, who remain their core audience. Changing that won’t affect the concert business soon — but it could affect the entire music industry over time.
Margin Walker
It’s funny how much venture capitalists used to complain about major labels, given that their businesses weren’t as different as either side would like: They both made big bets, against tough odds, on terms that as a result had to favor them. These days, though, labels face more competition than ever from distributors, both those they own and those they don’t. This pushes artists to demand better terms, which is great except that these deals don’t come with as much of a runway. The bets on creators get smaller, safer and shorter-term. It’s easy to resent the major-label business model until you realize just how much of their gross profit goes into finding, signing, developing and marketing new artists.
It’s the Same Old Song
Although these things are hard to measure, it seems harder than ever to break new acts. Catalog dominates streaming — not the old rock that some envision but the hits of the last decade or so. The dominant artists of the time I’ve been at Billboard have been Taylor Swift, The Weeknd and Drake — with the last of them recently losing some ground to Bad Bunny and Morgan Wallen. Whether these artists are enjoying their justly deserved dominance or clogging up the charts depends on how much you like them — but they have all had great runs. Who’s next? More stars emerge all the time, but it does seem to be harder than ever to develop them.
