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:
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
But yes, every year or three there are more places to put your money.
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.
More difficult to go to the store?
Also, 8-track tapes?
Total speculation.
It's right about when the "Home Taping Is Killing Music" campaign came about.
CDs didn't arrive in large numbers until the mid 80s.