Potential Streaming Plateau

Only a few years ago, the music industry as a whole was fearing for its existence. The internet had caused physical music sales to decline drastically. By the early 2010s, sales figures had already plummeted. Many experts speculated that to be the end of the music industry as we know it. And in a way it was. Unexpectedly, however, it is now on a strong comeback. The rise of Spotify and digital music streaming pivoted the industry and gave it a second life. For the past few years now, overall revenues for the industry have been on a steady increase, despite physical sales still declining. However, streaming is still in its early years. It is hard to say what the future of the platform looks like. Companies like Spotify and Apple are banking on continuous growth. Many others, however, believe a plateau in revenues is inevitable.
I fall into the latter of the two camps. I don’t know how much longer the music industry can continue operating in this way. Streaming revenues for artists are already razor-thin. Streaming services take home over half of the revenue they collect before any of it goes to record labels or musicians. After that, the royalties get split between the record label, publisher, distributor, everyone who helped make the song, and then finally the artist. Last year Spotify had to ink a deal with the major record labels to pay them even less in revenue so that they could stay profitable. I fear that revenues for artists will only continue to go down.
Some artists may not even care about that. Musicians have never had the bulk of their money from music sales. Touring has always been the biggest moneymaker for musicians. Many artists don’t even care about the royalties from their streams and are just happy that people are listening to their music at all. I feel it is a very dangerous path to go down. Eventually, musicians may not even own the rights to their music at all. I think this would be detrimental to the art form. Large companies like Spotify should be doing everything in their power to ensure that their platform is sustainable for artists.
Spotify itself is very interesting from a PR perspective. Because of these royalty nightmares, they do not have the best image among people in the music industry, or those who know (and care) how royalties work. On the other hand, however, they have some of the most loyal listeners in the industry. If revenues for streaming services and artists do not improve, I think the public perception of Spotify and its competitors is bound to change eventually.