The lesson here is to keep touring. A new Citigroup report has found recording artists received 12% of the $43 billion the music industry pocketed last year. The bulk of the earnings came from gigging.
How did the music industry pocket $43 billion in 2017?
The report published Monday saw the $43 billion matches a 12-year peak that the industry hasn’t seen since 2006. Part of the total revenue artists are pocketing has actually risen since 2000, when artists took home only 7% share of the revenue.
Where is the spike coming from? Mostly touring. The increase is mainly due to the growth of concerts and touring as a revenue stream. Artists take home a scanty share of the increasing revenues in streaming for their music, where the industry act as their wing-man.
Here’s what the report looks like
The Citigroup report shows that “consumer outlays”. This includes streaming, concert sales, and purchased music. They generated an all-time high of more than $20 billion last year. However, the music industry took almost $10 billion, while artists banked $5.1 billion.
The report is looking out for “organic forms of vertical integration” in the industry, where existing music providers like Spotify and Apple Music could “organically morph into music labels,” allowing artists to grab more of their music’s value by releasing their work directly with the services.
Here’s another highlight. An alternative voice in the industry, Bjorn Niclas, co-founder of Choon, a cryptocurrency-based music streaming service said, “Currently artists are at the end of the line, they get the smallest piece of the pie even though they are the ones creating the content. In any other industry you typically see much better returns and margins.”
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