Reference to this article that was posted today in another thread.


"When Spotify initially launched way back in 2008, the music industry was in a death spiral. CD sales were plummeting. iTunes sales were not making much of a dent in the piracy ravaging the industry. "

RIAA stats don't support this and I remember it clearly as I wrote an article on it at uni at the time.

Overall revenue was down but actually holding up considerably well considering the financial crisis that kicked in. Accounting for the nosedive that discretionary income took, the industry did very well. And unit sales were up, not down. The advent of the iTunes store finally gave the consumer what they wanted - to buy the actual singles they wanted and not be forced into the album model with lots of fillers they didn’t want.

This was also the time that the industry tried to claim that all piracy was lost revenue…..lol….if the money wasn’t there in the first place, i.e., never existed, it is not lost revenue.

So who is this Ari c**t and why is he trying gaslight us?

While your concern is valid and you seem to know more than Ari… it’s a bit far to call him that.

Also, the whole article is a hit piece against Spotlfy. The part you quote is mostly there, I believe, to balance it a bit. Like he’s saying well maybe they did play a role at some point but it’s so corrupt now that we need move past it.

Btw good point about how stupid it was to claim that all piracy was lost revenue. I bought records before piracy as a teenager but pretty much none of my friends did. When piracy come, they pirated, but their money would have gone to drinks either way. Only music nerds bought records except for christmas gifts.

We already know that many teenagers who pirated went onto to buy music as well as merchandise and concert tickets once they were earning.

If you are going to write an article against Spotify (or anyone), at least start of with some actual facts rather bull****. And for that he deserves the title given.

2004
Digital Single download units = 139.4 million

Physical CD Singles units = 3.4 million

Total units = 142.8 million


2005
Digital Single download units = 366.9 million

Physical CD Singles units = 2.8 million

Total units = 369.7 million


2006
Digital Single download units = 586.4 million

Physical CD Singles units = 1.7 million

Total units = 588.1 million


2007
Digital Single download units = 809.9 million

Physical CD Singles units = 2.6 million

Total units = 812.5 million


2008
Digital Single download units = 1033 million

Physical CD Singles units = 0.7 million

Total units = 1033.7 million

Accurate numbers. Piracy has always existed and with music, notably since blank cassettes took off in the 70s.

Some folk laughed when Jobs launched iTunes but it was profitable from day 1 and it wasn’t long after that Apple became the largest music store on the planet (and still is).

The industry had a close call after the launch of Napster, MP3.com, etc. iTunes and other legal digital download stores corrected that. The music industry’s actual death began with the launch of Spotify and other streaming services. Why pay for a download when you can listen to it or anything else for practically nothing (a monthly subscription). Streaming is legalised piracy.

one of the saddest things is that records are no longer viable as Christmas or Birthday gifts. The physical object has no perceived value and the music on it, as much as people love it can be obtained anywhere at any time for little or know money.

It would be like giving someone a videotape of the nightly news.

I grew up with vinyl and cassette but I don't miss it at all, yet I enjoy user experience. I prefer removing a cork from a bottle of wine to a screw top. I like the connection of dialing in new coffee beans and the labouriousness of the process. But with music I just want to enjoy what I hear - I don’t need the other stuff. It sounds good and stirs something in me or it doesn’t.

don't be sad, they are a great Christmas or Birthday gift, and very popular with the kids these days. Taylor Swift fans who don't own a turntable put them on the wall.

The good thing about albums is the size and the covert art, inserts and posters. Visuals to stimulate the imagination while you listen to the music. They even put art on the disc itself, imagine that. It could even be white.

Taylor Swift sold 1,334,000 vinyl copies of Showgirl in the first week.

That’s extremely interesting considering that Spotify wasn’t profitable (in book-keeping terms) for their first 15 years!

Of course the owners became multi-billionaires through equity and stock market schemes, growing at all costs and pumping up evaluation while technically being improfitable. There’s a name for that. Ponzi scheme?

In any case I have a lot more respect for Apple and iTunes than for Spotify. Apple put a reasonable value on music, and the money went directly to the right people. If you buy a song off iTunes, the people who made the music actually get that money.

While on Spotify, the money made by indie releases instead goes to the major labels and the mood music fake artists.

Of course, streaming was nearly inevitable (it could have been declared illegal of course, no reason it couldn’t have). But if it would have emerged out of iTunes, it would have been way fairer, more sustainable and less slop and podcasts on the platform.

The format itself drove the proliferation of "album music", as without the LP, it would just be singles.

Album music produced some of the most timeless classics that will probably never be succeeded in popularity.

The LP itself is a commitment: you're not skipping songs, you're not turning it off halfway through and watching a Tiktok video instead.

In some ways -- alot of ways perhaps -- it was the superior format for listening to music.

people skipped songs all the time on vinyl - more so than on cassette

Cassettes, in the later boomboxes and home stereos, had an auto-stop/skip feature in all but the cheapest units.

A few vendors tried that with record players but it was expensive and cumbersome/failure prone.

Manually skipping songs on an LP wasn't really a thing I witnessed very often, but maybe I just listened to better albums than you.

My Nakamichi DR-1 had no such feature.

You contradict yourself in the last sentence. Are you saying you only witnessed yourself using LPs? And are you going to name some of these albums?

Sigh, ArgueSpace.com.

Do we really need to continue on here? I think I'm good.

Just calling your bullshit out pal. You made the decision to post that nonsense. Nobody made you.

Skipping tracks on records was/is not a common thing and cassette auto-locate features were on many of the tape/radio units by the time the 90s rolled around.

Sony called in Automatic Music Sensor, it was also called Auto-Locate, Index Search, and worked by detecting gaps (silence) between songs.

I had a cheap-ass Sanyo boombox with that feature.

That was never a thing on record players except the most exotic expensive ones and never took off.

And everything else I've said is true about the LP format fostering albums over singles, and the idea of the concept album was born thanks to LP and stereo proliferation.

I was working HiFi shops in the 90s. Most did not have that function.

There was no need on a record player. One just lifted the tonearm up and placed it at the start of the song they wanted. Much quicker than cassette.

Yes, agreed on the LP giving the labels the model to push for more revenue. The advent of iTunes and single downloads proved that the vast majority of customers didn't want the whole album.Too many fillers. Only a few albums were good enough to play all the way through.

Well, I never suggested that albums stayed that way, only started that way, but so much was better about music in the Golden Era, it's easy to forget that compared with today.

I’d say that the album as it appeared after 1965 (Pet Sounds, Revolver etc and after) is not just the superior format for listening to music.

It is the best and most complete form of art work humanity ever came up with.

It has the best from music, poetry and painting/photography and combines it into a tangible physical art work I can hold in my hand, and need to take some care of, where the interplay of all those artistic elements strengthen the whole and each other.

Imagine the music of Revolver without Klaus Voorman’s cover art - or vice versa. They’d still be great artistically but they wouldn’t be that very thing and for someone who gets into an album it’s a huge part of the feel and even meaning.

An album title itself is poetry. Short and intensely meaningful. It makes even instrumental music saturated with poetic meaning when listened to. Think of Miles’s albums, or Coltrane’s.