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Remember [HitClips](https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/9f3q8p/anyone_re...)?

One minute of incredibly low quality audio from popular songs stored in a physical cartridge, with a dedicated player.

The 90s had some wild ideas for music monetization.

> "Long-term, when the final vestiges of openly available music vanish (CDs gone, streamed content heavily DRM'd)"

Thankfully the options to simply buy and download music in DRM-free formats are better than ever. So I don't think that prophecy will come true.

No matter how locked down mainstream music gets, there will always be artists who will stand up for open, easy and in some cases free access to their music.

And of course there will always be torrents, usenet, irc, or whatever.

Even if that weren't the case, the final choice is "don't buy that song".

There is always competition, and that will always keep a lid of prices to an extent.

In the US, the ringtone company I worked for charged $1 for monotonic tones, $2 for polyphonic, and $3 for 'real tones', a short sample.

Long-term, the only valuable resource is attention. Content is accumulating, faster and faster due to automation, thus its value is declining.

Artists can make money with concerts so they will pay you to become part of your life. Even now, youtube is already playing entire songs as advertisement. Why should it stop there?

This is incredibly true and scary. Just had that realization.

The only answer is less engagement.

If you consistently churn out good content, you will have people's attention, and that attention is monetizable. It has never been easier to go from nobody in the middle of nowhere to somebody known everywhere. There isn't one big category of losers so much as pockets of people who don't adapt well to the platform economy.

I do, however, think that we should reduce monopolistic behavior by platforms to enhance gains to content producers and consumers. I also think that the government should provide a better safety net, so that content producers don't have to lose several years of their life to a miserable, existential slog with the hope of stardom. It might still be a slog, but it doesn't have to be so miserable (no government health insurance is a big factor in America).

Ringtones barely made a blip amidst the rapidly declining CD revenue. CD revenue started to decline after Napster was released in 1999 and the music industry never fully recovered. Good chart here:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-sales/

It looks like this could also be partly due to the recessions in 2001 and 2008, based on the chart, as well as the decline in physical media.

If you notice, the decline started in 1999, while economy was absolutely booming. There was also a recession in 1991, and the industry revenue continued to grow there. CDs were still very much the primary method of consumption for audio well into the early 2000s. But yes, eventually (by 2005 or so) the iPod had become very sleek and popular. Still, iPods were generally powered by iTunes sales, and you'll note the iTunes sales never made up for the loss in CD sales. Part of the reason for that could be that for the first time, you could buy single tracks rather than pay for an entire album of songs you may or may not like. Certainly torrents had a dramatic effect on sales. Even when I was in high school in early 2000s, kids were selling bootlegged CDs for $5 a pop because they had burners and fast enough connections to download many songs (broadband wasn't even that widespread in early 2000s). Everyone was on Napster after it came out in 1999. I can't even describe to you the magic of being able to download virtually any song you can think of. Prior to that, you had to hunt a song down physically or listen to a radio station for hours, hoping to catch it in time to press the record button on your cassette tape.

Great point about CDs being pretty much recession-proof. Minor quibble:

> iPods were generally powered by iTunes sales

I think this is the lionised view of the iPod, but it's not really backed up by the stats or the early marketing ("Rip. Mix. Burn.") which was targeted at folks who were still buying CDs.

Apple sold its 10 millionth iTunes song in September of 2003, and around that time would have sold around 1.5 million iPods (they'd sold 600k in January '03, and announced that they'd shipped 2 million in January '04). So if you assume that all iTMS sales are to iPod owners (as someone who did not own an iPod until around 2007, but bought music on iTunes, I am a very small datapoint that speaks to this not being true!), then the average iPod owner either only had only around 7 songs on their iPod, or iPods were principally powered by CD rips and illegal downloads.

It doesn't change the thrust of your point but I thought you might find it interesting.

iTunes wasn't even available on Windows initially. (Although it was added pretty quickly.) It was definitely primarily initially about songs ripped from CDs (or downloaded via Napster).

The first iPod to really become popular was the 4G, which I think not coincidentally was also the first to have proper USB support. iTunes not being on Windows seems like a lesser factor; even if iTunes was on Windows it wouldn't have mattered because most Windows computers of that time did not have firewire ports. As soon as iPods supported USB fully, their popularity took off like a rocket.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#/media/File:Ipod_sales_pe...

Incidentally, cmdrtaco was right about the extant iPod he was actually criticizing. It was lame and that iPod never became popular. He's mocked in retrospect because later revisions of the iPod became massively popular, but the version he was responding to never did.

I largely agree with all that. The eventual incredible success of the iPod which in turn was the beachhead for the iPhone (which also wasn't really a massive success until the 3G) tends to obscure its early history.

The initial iPod was basically one of many digital music players available at the time and, as you say, you couldn't even really use it with the desktop computers that had something like 95% market share.

Apple clearly became one of the most successful companies ever, but it's not like that was an inevitability as soon as they released the first iPod.

Totally agree, in the main. Looking back it's very weird and un-Apple-like that iPod launched without iTMS, although taking their time held them in good stead with the App Store and simultaneously launching new hardware alongside a marketplace seems to have held them back with iPad/iBooks and the watch + its anaemic store.

I quibble one point you made (sorry -- former employees sometimes turn into nitpicking apologists):

> cmdrtaco was right about the extant iPod he was actually criticizing. It was lame and that iPod never became popular.

You're right that this iPod never became as popular as we understand the iPod to have been looking back from 2020, but the implication is that it was held back because of the assessment cmdrtaco made of it:

> No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

Clearly it had no WiFi and a lower capacity than a Nomad, but that would continue to be the case for many years, right up to peak iPod in 2008 when Apple introduced the first iPod with WiFi (iPod Touch 1G). (Apple was never interested in competing on capacity -- a feature -- and actively sought to reframe marketing towards _benefits_, like how many songs or photos the capacity enabled you to hold in your pocket.)

So the absence of WiFi and lower capacity than Creative's lineup did not appear to be limiting factors in the iPod's success. I think they made it lame to cmdrtaco, but each subsequent iPod for the better part of a decade 'suffered' from the same lameness, and did so well that Amazon had precisely two sections for MP3 players for many years: "iPod" and "Non-iPod Music players"!

I believe that the tipping point for iPod came alongside several things: the final refinement to the interaction model (scroll wheel => touch wheel -- the first device is identifiably an iPod but almost ashamedly so, with buttons around the edge of the wheel which ruin the fascia), the miniaturisation of the device (and in particular the ruthless Jobsian cannibalisation of the Mini with the Nano), and the vacuum of competition around iTMS from its launch through 2006 or so.

> then the average iPod owner either only had only around 7 songs on their iPod

I think its actually not that unrealistic that the median iPod only had 7 songs on it. I briefly worked on Kindle software and IIRC the median active Kindle was only used to read maybe 3 books or something (but the mean was much higher because there's a very long tail).

The OG iPod predates the iTunes store so I think it’s more likely to be at least an album’s worth of music.

Napster was a godsend. The music industry was a racket. In 1999 it would cost me around $32 for a single CD album here in Australia. That's close to $55 dollars today adjusted for inflation. When music/movies/games first moved to online distribution they had artificially inflated prices here. The cost of these would often be 40-80% than what Americans would pay. This was due to their distribution deals that companies had to artificially drive up prices here. When the Australian dollar rose against the US dollar they changed out prices to Australian dollars, since for the first time we were paying the same as the Americans. Overnight these things rose in price 50%.

I pay for my music. I have had a Spotify subscription for years. They're offering me a product at a reasonable price. You try to extort people and they'll move back to piracy.

I wouldn't call it extortion. The music industry doesn't produce the same quality or number of quality songs it once did. There hasn't even been any substantially new genres in two decades. It's much, much harder to make it big as an independent artist these days. Besides the monetization problem, which is a big one, you also have a big discovery problem. There's a lot of things competing for people's time and attention and you have to compete with all the other songs in people's large streaming libraries to make a fraction of what you would have from CD sales two decades ago.

> you also have a big discovery problem

I find it far easier than ever before to discover new music. Which leads me to:

> It's much, much harder to make it big as an independent artist these days

My (possibly naive and certainly not backed by any insider knowledge) thinking is, that this is because you have far more than there used to be as the barrier of entry is far lower. I’ve bought music from all kinds of artists than I probably would never even have found even just 10 years ago.

My (certainly naive and not backed by any knowledge) opinion is that nowadays it's much easier to make it as a nobody. That's why it's happening so much, and they're all competing with each other. Now we have many very good musicians, but the studios won't manage to create another legendary musician anymore.

I'm afraid to ask, but what "substantially new" genre do you suppose came into existence two decades ago?

I would bet the exact opposite of your entire comment is true. Instead of a new genre every decade or two, we now have new genres multiple times per decade. It is much easier to make it big as an independent artist thanks to a multitude of large open entry platforms, and there is more money flowing into the music industry than ever.

There are more talented artists in all genres, and thanks to music production hardware/software becoming essentially free a lot of that talent is being adequately produced.

Ah yes, I remember when the problem with the music industry was big bad scary DRM.

But now DRM on everything is just cool, because the DRM allows tech companies for which the majority of HN works for instead of the big bad scary RIAA and MPAA to control the product and skim off most of the money while adding the least value.

DRM on music is deader than Elvis. I can buy music from Amazon, Apple, or on CD, vinyl or magtap from a record store. None of them employ DRM.

I think that’s GP’s point: lots of people justified pirating music because “DRM sucks and so does the RIAA for suing grandmothers,” and the people with the ability to push back (people in the tech industry, a much smaller group than now) did and DRM was quietly left behind for music purchases.

But now that the tech industry is larger, fewer people, as a percentage, care about DRM so it is on books, movies, games, and most else...except music.

Ah, Napster. Reminds me of this ancient Flash animation https://youtu.be/fS6udST6lbE

> Napster was a godsend. The music industry was a racket.

Completely true - and the reason why, is because it forced competition on the music industry. Competition that couldn't be bought out. Napster wasn't completely free - it came with the costs legality and a bit of tech know how, but it brought competition to the industry.

And overall it again exposed one of the key points. Free markets dont benefit consumers, competitive markets do. Consumers and society benefits when people are free and capable to successfully enter and exit markets as consumers as they see fit, and when entrepreneurs are free and capable of successfully entering markets as suppliers as they see fit. Locked distribution channels, exclusivity deals and the rest all prevent this. Without competitive markets, you end up with gross-rent seeking.

Competitive markets benefit consumers and society overall, Pure free markets incentivize seeking.

Heavy handed government intervention can eliminate competition in suppliers, however other suppliers are frequently the number one force in current markets eliminating competition in suppliers. And the end result for consumers (as we saw in the record industry) is just as bad.

If we're arguing against regulatory capture, and government limiting market efficiency, then we need to be arguing just as strongly against exclusivity deals, locked distribution channels and moats.

If a tower is teetering one way, giving it a shove so it's now teetering just as far another way is no better when we want it to stand balanced.

Trading govt enabled rent-seeking for industry enabled rent seeking is in no way a win for consumers or society.

And arguing the benefits of free markets while ignoring the fact they aren't competitive due to industry moat building tactic is hypocritical.

This article misses existing revenue streams for "Ring&Sing" where you pay for your calling party to hear the song of your choice instad of a ringing sound until you pickup. These subscriptions are huge earners in big markets like India some claim it makes up for lost sms revenues.

But I also spent many hours on GoldWave 4.x mixing my own mp3 ringtones for years and still enjoy picking out a good riff when I hear it. I have a nice section of Eric Clapton's Layla looped as well as some Chilli Peppers, the Doors intro to Love me 2 Times, the sax on Born to Run + Quite a few more.

There is a quite significant dip 1979-82. Anybody knows the reason?

No but interviews mention Quincy Jones saying that he made Thriller to "save the music industry". Ambition aside, it seemed to be a serious issue.. yet I can't recall why ? post disco fad counterwave ?

Gas crisis?

More difficult to go to the store?

Also, 8-track tapes?

Total speculation.

Home record/radio dubbing?

It's right about when the "Home Taping Is Killing Music" campaign came about.

It was a fairly severe recession (that partly led to Reagan's election). To other comments, it was well past the gas crisis, cassette taping had been around for ages, and CDs were just coming in (which, if anything, led to people replacing worn vinyl with new digital media). So I'm mostly going with recession.

Recession yes, though it was at the end of that period when Volcker moved to quash inflation.

CDs didn't arrive in large numbers until the mid 80s.

When did FM radio take off? Maybe that's a connection?

Also, it might be more useful to consider if the CD era was an outlier. Also, I don't know if the start date is of any significance.

That's such an interesting graphic.

I got my first cd for christmas 1994 as a kid and I was kind of in the middle of adoption. Middle-class family in Germany. Some friends of mine already had CD players, but not all.

MCs were still everywhere, but I can't really comment on how much people actually spent.

I simply can't believe that the 1990-92 numbers are true in an adoption sense, or maybe the revenue was just a lot better than for MCs, because I honestly don't know anyone who had a meaningful CD collection in 1990 already. And this is not because I was too young (see above, first CD in 94) but even my friends' parents didn't have CDs from the 80s, later in the 90s.

1990-92, kids didn't have CD players yet but the "Hi-Fi generation" that grew up alongside the rock and pop music industry were deep enough into their careers to have the disposable income for buying a CD player and an accompanying library of CD re-releases of the LPs they could not afford when they were young. Re-releases where huge in the transition period from LP to CD.

In California suburbs, I remember when the somewhat upper-middle-class teenager next door showed off his CD player in the early 80s, before he graduated high school. It was the first and most primitive one I ever saw.

Within a few years, my parents had added one to their hifi system, as did most other families I knew. Well before I graduated high school in '92, I had added a 10-disc changer to my bedroom hifi, using my own odd job cash from paper routes, lawn mowing, etc. It was some kind of scratch/dent item I got from the local home electronics store, and I think it cost me less than my first walkman from the mid-80s.

I might have only owned two dozen CDs by then, still having a lot more music on tapes. I can't remember for certain whether the "record clubs" that kids got into for vinyl LPs also existed for CDs, but I suspect they did.

It's US music industry sales data, so there's no reason to believe it applies _directly_ to Germany.

Also that's revenue.

I didn't check, but isn't Compact Disc an industry standard and registered trademark, that required payment? So, there would be revenue associated with hardware sales which would front load the figures??

That chart needs an overall revenue area, and an items sold overlay to make it really useful.

Sure, but these should usually be at least comparable in certain countries? I don't have any insight, I wouldn't have expected it to be 5+ years off. Maybe the US and Japan were indeed further ahead by a few years.

I asked my well-off dad for a CD player for Xmas in the mid to late 80s. By 1990 I had around a hundred discs, many thanks to the CD club (via mail, Columbia House and BMG) which made them available at prices about $4-$6 a piece, though you had to buy 16-20 or so at a time.

Napster and the like hurt the music industry but didn't land the killing blow to CDs. The murder weapon was the cheap DVD player.

In the mid-nineties, my cool friends with money had huge collections of CDs and listened to a lot of music. It was not uncommon to see shelves with scores of CDs proudly displayed in the living room next to an expensive stereo system.

By the early 2000s that was gone, replaced by a DVD player, the largest TV they could afford, and a stack of DVDs. Maybe a game console or two as well. All the disposable income that a decade earlier was being poured into music was now going toward the film and gaming industries.

Sure there was plenty of piracy but I would argue not enough to explain the drop.

It's an interesting point and think it has merit. Personally however, I never bought many DVDs, probably less than 1/10 of the CDs I have. The main reason is that there are few movies I want to watch over and over again like a good album. Perhaps because an album can play in the background, but a dvd practically demands an afternoon or evening dedicated to it.

But yes, every year or three there are more places to put your money.

But even aside from Napster and CD-Rs and iPods, the seeds of a downturn were planted in the 1980s.

There had been generations of format replacements-- cylinders to 78 to 45 to 33, reel-to-reel to weird cartridges and 8-track, then onward to compact cassette, but the CD ended up being the last meaningful physical audio format.

It's durable enough that people aren't having to re-buy their favourites after they unspool in the player, or the groove was reamed out by a heavy tonearm. It's high-fidelity enough that a replacement format won't make a sonic difference on most consumer grade equipment. It's convenient enough that people didn't need to buy another format as a compromise for portable play.

This meant all past business models for music consumption were going to fail as CDs reached saturation. You're not going to be selling a lot of classic albums anymore. The only way to go forward would have been an endless supply of new content, but then we get to the matter of attention and shelf space being finite.

Sure, Napster may have been pulled the trigger, but it shot an uindustry that was already on the verge of a massive coronary.

I definitely paid over £5 once for a cd single in the 90's, so pretty sure this isnt when music was worth the most

> Lesson here if no-one saw it, the more you control the means of distribution and playback, the higher the price you can extract from the listener.

For a snapshot, a brief moment in time, sure. But notice what the article points out- this business is gone, gone, gone. It is possible to think on longer timeframes than one transaction, one offering.

Lesson here if parent missed it, provide actual value if you want to exist for longer than a moment.

Someone once told me he made $60 an hour doing the easiest job of his life. I asked what it was, and he told me someone paid him one dollar to watch their seat for one minute. Not a bad rate- not a sustainable one either.

Do you remember ring BACK tones? In some countries you could choose what your ring sounded like on someone else's phone. So I could force your phone to play the latest Britney Spears track or whatever. Complete violation of personal space.

I don't remember it but isn't ringback tone the tone that your hear when calling someone. Here is the sample for Europe: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/1TR110-1...