If you are contemplating the future of music sales revenue, the most alarming thing about inexpensive (they actually call it “premium”) all-you-can-eat streaming models (Spotify, MOG) where music fans pay roughly $72.00 a year (for example) for endless access to all the music in the world (anytime, anywhere, anyplace), is that the $72.00 is divided by (all songs consumed times each song’s play-frequency).
Somebody did the math and determined $72.00 equates to some portion of the historical and statistical average of what rightsholders expected to obtain previoulsy and otherwise. However in 2009, this is the first time where the individual, annual serving-size of the TOTAL recorded music spending pie has been pegged to a finite dollar amount (I don’t count eMusic). It’s also the first time where the size of the pie isn’t proportionately grown each time a new artist appears on someone’s radar…it’s now (in these models) proportionately divided. (“More spins for you, means less revenue for me…”)
Is it time to look at music consumers, each as a stack of seventy-two dollars; everybody get what you can because that’s it? Or, are these models, combined with advancements in music discovery and recommendation, part of a leveling playing field where more and more artists will be heard, thus opening new revenue channels for numerous artists, which ultimately leads to growing the overall pie again?
Consumers seem to love these streaming models, and they are supposed to be the industry’s solution to music theft. However I can’t help but wondering, with the exception of pop stars, if everyone else would be better off selling downloads priced at ten cents each?