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Comment by yxwvut | Hacker News Reader

The total pie has absolutely grown. There were a little under 1 billion US album sales in 2000 (the peak of CDs). Spotify alone paid around $3.5B in royalties in the US last year (with similar #s for apple music and a bit less for YT music).

I suspect the disconnect comes from a) a big increase in the # of artists b) artists trying to compare apples to oranges #s as though every stream would've been an album/MP3 sale c) the timeline of revenues: an album sale is a big cash flow shortly after the album release, but streaming revenue is a slow trickle as users gradually discover the album, listen, re-listen, etc

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This data appears to disagree, with revenue peaking in 2000:

https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

Do you have a source for your numbers?

Well, we just saw Hollywood unions have a 4-month long strike over the portion of residuals they were receiving under streaming. I'm willing to bet that their complaints about not getting what they used to under prior contracts and models are entirely accurate.

We're also in a situation now where the media owners are building silos for their own content instead of licensing it and letting independent platforms compete on platform services and quality. That's not good for the people buying those services, either.

The pie might be bigger, but the same old middlemen are claiming the difference.

There's at least one bit that's missing here, even if the claim is entirely accurate:

Both the total pie and the total number of creators has increased. Hollywood feature film production is [estimated](hhttps://www.quora.com/How-many-people-work-in-the-film-indus...) to be 3000-7000 people. There are [approximately 61.1 *million* YouTube creators](https://explodingtopics.com/blog/youtube-creator-stats), or approximately 10,000 times more. There could easily be 100x more money flowing to the total visual entertainment creator community and the old guard film creators could still get less than they used to.

I don't know exactly what to search for to get similar numbers for music production, but I suspect it is similar: There's a lot more creators and they get less each even though it's more in total, and this is especially hitting "old timers" that used to get the bulk of the old total and get less with the new setup.

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