The Corrs Club

There was interesting coverage today on BBC News Channel about the UK music industry.
01-Jan-2020 12:18:38

CorrsClub Time:
28-Mar-2024 05:21:16

I didn't catch all of it but basically they were talking about how much the 'industry' had changed in the last decade. Somewhat surprisingly, the UK music industry is now doing very well indeed, mainly due to the staggering number of streaming downloads which numbered around 80 billion in 2019. Having listeners paying a few pence/cents for a download is far more financially lucrative for the artists and labels than physical sales of records/casettes/cds ever were. Being interviewed were a record company CEO and a current singer/songwriter, both of whom were perfectly happy with the current system. It was acknowledged that sales of music are now secondary to live performances and tours - which is where the real money is made. Nowadays you sell a record to get listeners along to a gig, rather than the old way of gigging to sell your records.

Online streaming and sales have also opened up the world to lesser known artists who in the past would have had great difficulty in selling their music in remoter regions. South America (a huge continent) was cited as an example - the appetite for current music of all genres is vast there and UK artists have had great success in selling and streaming online, the same for the Far East. This success in sales has prompted young artists and bands to start their own indie record labels and to self fund tours to areas of the world that would have been financially uncertain for them ten years ago when sales and tours were organised by a mere handful of large multinational record labels.

The final summing up was that the industry is healthy and doing very well, new younger artists and labels accept the current methods as 'the norm' because they have known nothing else. Those dissatisfied tend to be older established bands and labels who failed to adopt new marketing methods and ways of working. I have to say that this has been my own recent experience as a 'music consumer' - there are far more gigs in all genres, the artists, their management and promoters are far more approachable and actually take on board and appreciate feedback from listeners/audiences.

dave
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