To begin, the only form of music really was live performance. This era aloud you to make money that didn’t really need to be split as much because there was a lot less ‘middle men’ than what we have today, like producers etc. It also gave a much more authentic feel to the artists music because you knew it was pure talent and didn’t hear anything like auto-tune. However, this meant that you could only make the money you made from that one gig, or multiple gigs of that song, because there was no other distributions, like CD’s, to help make you some extra money.
As time developed, the printing press then came around so this aloud you to write music, creating more jobs in the industry, and being able to advertise you shows, therefore allowing more notice and then hopefully more money from more people showing up and wanting to see it. This also gave you an opportunity to manipulate, in a way, people to attend shows and buy merch because it meant you had to design posters and billboards so you could pick fonts, colours and pictures to entice sales, i.e. like the colour red is used in a lot of food places because it’s said to make you hungry. This, again, opened more jobs because now you could write music or design posters etc to actually gain sales for the music. Advertisement plays a huge role in sales, such as having the billboard in Times Square, NYC, can gain you loads of sales because of how many people will have just been exposed to the idea of you and your music.
In the 60’s, music exploded as more and more people fell in love with it. Thomas Edison’s invention of the synthesizer was an astounding development for the industry because it just expanded the different sounds to explore and aloud people to not get ‘bored’ of the regular sounds of the regular piano etc.
The 70’s-90’s was really when huge changes in the industries distributions occurred. Phonography’s, record players, cassette’s and CD’s all came around, alongside online streaming serves. When all physical forms of music outlets came around, this made it a lot easier for musicians to make money because you was paying for the product so it’d cost a lot more, like £10 a CD. However, this also decreased earnings because now there was a lot more ‘middle men’ to pay, such as the designers who made the CD, the photographers for the cover, the publisher who actually made the physical for, and a lot more other people who were involved in the process. Having physical forms slowly started to deduct when online streams came around. When your music is produced on Spotify alone, per 1000 view, you only earn around £5. This is an incredibly low amount and actually causes a lot of disagreements with musicians working along side each other because anyone who plays the backing track for you needs to be payed, as well as the singer, as well as the producer etc. This entices people to make their music available on all platforms so you have a wider opportunity to make more money and pay everyone that worked on the track. Due to an astonishingly low income rate from online streams, a lot of artists make the majority of their music from selling merch or going on tour. Although it’s difficult to make money solely online, it also has it’s perks. Thanks to social media becoming increasingly more popular than the 70/80’s era, you can get your name out there a lot easier. Social media allows you to get a lot of recognition a lot faster than what you used to be able to when there was only like A&R people around to scout out new talent.
The industry works very much like you’re either an Ariana Grande, no problem with money or sales because she’s extremely big, or you’re nothing and just struggling. It’s incredibly hard to get into the industry as a big artist but there isn’t really a middle ground that’s stable, you can be growing one day but then stay stuck for a long time if you’re not big.
Corona-Virus would have affected artists massively because a lot of their incomes come solely from merch sales or touring but they can’t do either really at the minute. There have been a lot of online concerts, which would have boosted peoples fan bases because a lot of people were looking for new music to listen to, but they still wouldn’t have got paid a whole lot because they’re not in person and because a lot of the online concerts were free for viewers. However, a lot of people did release a lot of new albums during COVID so they did drop a little bit of merch for that but a lot of people still couldn’t buy their merch because of job redundancy making money tight, so they still didn’t really make a whole lot from that.
Overall, the music industry is incredibly hard to get in! It’s not very stable ground to start with and due to social media playing a huge factor in how people are actually streaming music today, you don’t have a very reliable income. However, with the right team of publishers etc, you can get big very easy, sometimes it can be very backwards because artists who release kind of rubbish music can get big when there’s someone who’s really talented that goes completely unnoticed. As for people who say the arts industry isn’t a real job, there’s a lot of hard work, blood, sweat and tears that go into a project and even that doesn’t guarantee a good income. This industry very much relies on you understanding what the GP (general public) want because if they aren’t taking it in, it won’t work.