The death of the music industry has been heavily debated for over 10 years, since the launch of Napster in 1999. At first, Napster launched one of the greatest social and digital revolutions in music to date, but it quickly turned into a nasty fight between artists, record labels and those who shared music files.
Similarly, Apple launched the iTunes Music Store in April 2003, allowing listeners the same ease of access to music with a slightly higher price point. The idea of allowing millions of fans easy access to music was still revolutionary in 2003. Unfortunately, musicians received barely a cut of the music sold.
Napster and iTunes, however, weren’t solely responsible.
The writers of “South Park” wrote an episode around the idea that stealing music wasn’t a big deal, because artists get paid tons of money and don’t need every dollar earned from a CD sold. However, the truth is it is incredibly difficult for artists to make even minimum wage by playing music.
On average, artists signed to a major record label make 50 cents per CD sold, and only 8 cents per MP3 download from iTunes. Let’s do the math. Minimum wage for a solo artist is set at an average of $1,160 per month, according to The Strut website.
Let’s say a band of five members makes an album and would like to make at least minimum wage. They would have to sell at least 139,200 albums (physical CDs) in stores, or 870,000 downloads in a year to make minimum wage across the board.
But if you know anyone in the music industry, you know that artists can only dream of selling these kind of numbers in the digitized musical economy.
Music has always been an interesting form of art. A book can be taken home, but is a different type of experience. A play is something you can only experience once, that you cannot enjoy multiple times without paying twice. Music has provided the American culture with one of the most unchanging forms of entertainment and art — yet we are unwilling to pay for it.
Many bands start at the bottom, having to pay their way onto a sold-out tour just to get their music in front of people. If they’re lucky enough, music listeners will steal their music and like them enough to pay to see them live some time. If they’re really lucky, they might sell a few shirts. Unless they’re the next One Direction or Nicki Minaj, odds are they’ll never play a show outside of their hometown.
Until we see the fundamental issues within stealing music, the artists that we love will continue to suffer until they can’t afford to make music anymore. Time and again, I’ve seen bands that I love “retire” from the industry to get regular jobs just to support their families.
My hope is that everyone begins to realize the problem with the status quo and start purchasing music by the bands they love before it happens to someone that they’ll miss.
Reach the columnist at caleb.varoga@asu.edu or follow him at @calebvaroga.
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