Happy New Year to everyone on the planet who are celebrating it. The Chinese, the Jews, Islam and certain religious cults will have to wait until they celebrate theirs.
Well, the CD Sales figures for 2018 are out, and what a shocker for those of you that, once upon a time, could actually earn a living from them, and from the music industry in general. I’m assuming the figures quoted are from UK sales, and the total is down to a frankly shocking 32 million overall. Not 32 million overalls, I mean 32 million sales in total. That’s not a lot when you consider the vast number of people, myself included, who are sniffing around the music business corpse trying to pull off a morsel of meat for themselves. Matron!…
The reason? Streaming, my friends, streaming. The principle of listening to a piece of music through a monthly subscription service without buying it – a practice so common now that it must be counted to form part of the weekly chart figures. It is responsible for the fact that CD and/or other physical sales are down by almost 10 million on the previous year, and that was low in the first instance.
This prompts the question: Does this trend and the relatively small income from streaming (compared to sales) mean that you artists who do try to earn a crust through music are more inclined to give up doing so? Please do comment if you have time between interviews. For myself, the answer would be that it does not and will not affect my music-making one iota, for the following two reasons:
1. Because, no matter how hard I try, I have never been able to make more than one UK Pound Sterling from the music industry, and that came at a gig somewhere in Camden, North London (I’ve forgotten where). Nothing I have ever released has generated any income whatsoever. This does not mean that I have no dedicated fans, I do – but any money that has been earned by music has gone towards costs. I can’t make enough to register a profit. Without my dedicated fans, though, I would literally be pissing money up the wall. Thank you to those who make the releasing of music worthwhile, despite being able to count you in tens rather than tens of millions. Better to have quality over quantity, so my dear old Mum used to say.
2. Because of the above reason, I am quite capable of making music because I love it for a whole variety of reasons. My last studio album of original songs produced by myself, No Smoke Without Fire, was released in 2011, almost eight years ago, and I have focused more recently on covers, just because I like doing them. No other reason. Half the Fun of the Fair was produced by my dear brother. If I do another album of my own songs, it will likely be done with my brother again, and not by myself. So I do what I love doing regardless of the income. If I put my covers on Soundcloud, it is not to make money, but simply for others to share in my joy. If I ever feel like recording my own songs again, then I will do so – again the timing of that will depend on what I feel like, rather than what the market dictates, because for me there is no ‘market’ other than my very dear friends.
But you proper musicians may feel differently. The difference between sales and streaming might affect whether you can afford to feed your pet snakes next month or not. In the past, I have often heard musicians complaining about the changes in the delivery of their music – not because general standards of musicianship have fallen, but because they are making less money than they did before. Nobody does anything for free in the world of music, unless it’s a ‘charity’ gig, which usually boosts your sales anyway. Most of the albums that did actually make some sales were compilations – seven out of the Top Ten, in fact. Only three artists, Post Malone, Drake and (predictably enough) Ed Sheeran made the Ten. Young Sheeran may be the last of a dying breed – the old-fashioned rock star, who has sold out Wembley Stadium on seven occasions with just him and his guitar, who has got to the top by working hard at his craft, playing lots of low-key gigs, writing great pop songs and boasting a lot of natural ability. But even he is going to feel the difference in his pocket if the trend towards streaming continues, which I suspect that it will. His income is going to drop sharply from hundreds to just tens of millions of pounds.
The situation in the USA is no better. In fact, it’s worse. Their total sales for last year was 89 million – a figure much lower than you would expect from a country that has around 5.5 times the population of the UK, so their sales should be around 165 million or so.
My advice to all you wildly successful musicians out there, frightened of losing income, would be this: do what I do and become a total, miserable, self-pitying commercial failure, and make sure that each venture you release, that you think is brilliant, is largely ignored by an indifferent public too scared to do anything other than listen to the safe, bland, tasteless music offered by the few acts that have made it into the stratosphere, promoted by large, corporate record labels who know nothing about music and everything about screwing the public out of every last penny they have. Also ensure that you sell only to a select few of dedicated, much-appreciated family and friends who are very dear to me. Sorry, I mean you.
*Sorry about this; for some reason, WordPress has stopped putting spaces between paragraphs, and I cannot seem to rectify it. If either of you knows how to repair this, do let me know. x
Stephen Butler - Rant Music 