It used to be you had to spend $20 on just one CD. People would spend thousands on CD collections.
These days you can access so much for free, and what isn’t free you can get for $10/month or less. Music piracy was rampant in the late 90s and 2000s with MP3s, these days no one even bothers with that because it’s all free anyway.
How do they still make money?
In: 15
Everyone gave a lot of answers as to why recording artists still make money from Spotify and YouTube.
But another piece of it is that >90% of musicians don’t make a living from selling singles / albums. They never have. Only the top artists make enough money to live on, the rest it’s just one portion of their income.
In general musicians make a lot more money from tours / concerts. It’s more work but far more profitable.
A lot of musicians also make money in other ways: writing commercial jingles, teaching private music lessons, and singing/playing in the background for other more famous musicians, just to name a few.
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