Reports: Music Industry

YouTube is the globe’s leading digital music service but it delivers comparatively little back to the music industry in direct revenue. Even the one billion dollars paid out in Content ID revenues only represents $0.14 for each of its one billion users per year, since the launch of Content ID in 2007.

The global digital music industry may only be growing steadily (5% in 2013) but beneath the headline number is a richly varied picture of different services, diverse regional growth rates and competing business models. To better understand this marketplace, MIDiA Research conducted a Global Music Services Tracker.

Since the advent of piracy artists have been told that they need not worry about declining music sales because their core business is making money from live and merchandise. At a headline level, macro music industry revenues appear to support the argument, but those numbers give little indication of the income that actually flows back to the artist nor of the impact of the hyper-concentration of revenue among the top 1% of artists.