Article written by Lauren Johnston.
The price of music is different for everyone, whether you simply just listen to music through the radio or whether you are in the music industry as a performer or one of the many hundreds of jobs available. Due to recorded music sales dying, it has sparked a lot of curiosity into the price of music itself. What are people spending on average per year on recorded music such as CD’s? Why have we basically stopped buying recorded music? These are some questions that I hopefully can help you find the answer to in this week’s article.
According to recode.net since 1999 the music industry entered into a massive decline as CD's became downloadable files. The download side of music never came close to the size of the physical side of buying music, this is not the only change we are seeing, we are now seeing a new era called streaming. Streaming music basically means you are hearing it in ‘real time’. No that does not mean that artist is singing that very song right now and you are getting to listen to it, it simply means that you get to listen to it here and now, on demand when you want it. No one really knows how big the streaming industry for music will get but many are thinking that it may be determined by the price of streaming music.
Streaming music is now easier than you think, with help from the internet and a bunch of apps to download you can have any song, anywhere, and at any time. Just to name a few apps; Amazon music, Apple music, Deezer, Google Play music, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Spotify, Tidal, Soundcloud and Tune In just to name a few. Most of these apps are free, unless you want to go premium, which is ad free, unlimited skips, and you can have access to ‘perks’ or other features in the app that only premium users can access, that the free version doesn’t. In saying that though, going premium comes at a cost, I personally know for Spotify it’s $11.99 a month which at a first quick thought about it wasn’t a big deal, but what’s 12 x 12? 144, that’s $144 a year, now that I have worked that out, I’m considering cancelling my account because I don’t have $144 a year to spend! But in all seriousness, downloading music and streaming music can make companies hundreds a year, so why would people go buying CD’s when companies can find small ways to charge you small amounts of money that add up to a lot over time?
When was the last time you heard of an ad for a CD about Amy Sharks new album or any other artist? You don’t, because why would they spend money on making ads when they know as soon as we hear a new song that we like, we are going to pull out our mobiles, jump on an app and either download it or add it to our playlist within that app. CD’s these days can sell for $15 in store but you can download as many albums as you want for “free” for only $11.99 a month, which one are you going to choose? It’s pretty simple, since the internet everything for big companies changes and for the music industry it comes as a bitter sweet thing, in the sense that recorded music sales go down, but downloading and subscriptions to app accounts go up.
Recode.net claims that in 1999, at the peak of the recorded market about $40 billion of recorded music was sold. This got me thinking how much did the average person spend on recorded music a year? I personally thought a couple of hundred dollars, but I soon found out that I was wrong. At the time according to the music trade group international Federation for the Phonographic Industry, across the 18 and over group (both across many countries or individually within one), the average amount spent came to $28 per consumer. If we are just looking at the consumer rate, as the above amount also includes people who did not buy any music that year, now if we only look at people who brought recorded music, the average jumps to $64 per year. All these figures came from a sweet time in history when you had to buy a whole CD just to listen to those two favorite songs.
As you can imagine that once someone figured out how to separate the songs off a cd and then be able to make them readily available to us for a fraction of the cost, the price of hard copy recorded music sales plummeted. Another study by NPD Group in 2011, found that the average person was spending about $55 a year on ALL forms of recorded music. Apple is probably one of the largest music retailers in the world, and they have come out with data showing that per iTunes account people were spending $12 per quarter, which calculates to $48 per year. It’s not hard to see that we as a community are spending less and less on actually buying music every year.
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