If the Internet is working for Musicians, Why aren’t more Musicians Working Professionally?

http://thetrichordist.com/2012/05/22/why-arent-more-musicians-working-professionally/

May 22, 2014
David Lowery

We keep hearing from web/tech gurus about how empowered artists are in the internet age, but yet, the numbers just don’t add up. It’s also ironic that tech bloggers like to promote the idea of “touring and t-shirts” as a solution to the difficulties musicians are having online. But it really sounds to us, more like an admission that there is no money for artists online in the Exploitation Economy to develop new and sustainable professional creative careers.

This is why, an ethical internet for all citizens is so important. Sometimes, the facts are just so simple…

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According to my friend, Tommy Silverman/Tommy Boy Records and the co-founder of the New Music Seminar recently told me that he did the math and only 228 artists broke 10,000 units for the first time last year out of 105,000 albums.

That’s 2.17% but only 15 of those did it without the help of a real label.

That’s not very encouraging to the other ninety-eight percent. While tens of thousand of artists are self-releasing their music, their ability to get noticed in a meaningful way is stifled by the sheer volume of music that is arriving daily at iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, MySpace Music, Yahoo, Rhapsody, Pandora, iHeart and others. Ten years ago, there were roughly twenty-five thousand album releases a year.

In 2009, it is estimated that there will be over one hundred thousand albums put into digital distribution. That’s roughly a million new tracks a year, four million minutes of music, or almost three thousand days-worth of song. But, maybe, if I listen really, really fast, I could….nope!”

The numbers below are equally sobering. Not only did the volume of sales drop from 2009 to 2010, but also the number of new releases also dropped. Many promoting the exploitation of artists are also proposing that the new lower barriers for access to distribution will increase creative output, but that also appears to be false.

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Salon recently reported stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that number of working professionals in the music industry are suffering a catastrophic decline. If these numbers were reported by any other industry it would make national headlines:

“Musical groups and artists” plummeted by 45.3 percent between August 2002 and August of 2011.”

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