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SvennoJ said:
I don't know. I quit buying anime as it became harder to get here... I wasn't a big collector of it (yet) anyway, got a couple incomplete series, mostly collect movies. However also my anime movie shelf has been static for years. I don't find it in stores anymore, thus no more exposure. I hate browsing menus like Netflix, but would go over shelves in stores / rental places for well over an hour. I loved browsing book stores, amazon selections online have me turned away within minutes. Maybe that's just me, digital menus suck. Shira: How has streaming changed the music industry? Ben: It’s been the industry’s salvation. Largely because of Spotify and other subscriptions, streaming provided the industry something it never had before: regular monthly revenue. To oversimplify, the big winners are the streaming services and the large record companies. The losers are the 99 percent of artists who aren’t at Beyoncé’s level of fame. And they’re angry about not sharing in the music industry’s success. |
Overall subscription business model comes to destroy some kind of artists who used to have a regular influx of cash: it's the niche artist. It's the singer who never sold million of copies, but could comeback one time every 2 years, release and album and then sell like some 200k-400k and start a niche concert tour for their highly loyal core audience
With album sales dying their sales numbers went down from 200k to closer to 0 and well, the monthly streams of their core audience won't indeed pay their bills, indie singers and bands more than never need to get mainstream support that's true and that's a shame
But it's also true music market was never fair not easy in first place and it was always reserved to big players. Just like indie games could never stood a chance against blockbusters indie artists could never compete against major labels when they have almost no radio airplay, no music store space, no TV space and lack every kind of marketing necessary to reach their audience. Remember unlike games we can find a plethora of screenshots and youtube cuts and analysis but music is much harder to advertise without given away your music for free (that's the main purpose of promoting singles). So many indie and rookie singers starting publishing their music completely free exactly because they lack common big promotions venues reserved to major labels
With streaming those acts have at least a chance to become more well know. I can't stop but act surprised every time an unknow singer I've been listening finally manage to break the mainstream (and that's become fairly common), and that's not because I'm some kind of deep obscure hardcore indie fan, I mostly listen to mainstream pop, rock and hip-hop I just don't mind browsing some unknow artist who just released something and got some praise from reviews. Recently was Kali Uchis, I've listened this girl the first time because she was featured in a random track of a Gorillaz album and love her ever since, listened her music always she drops something and then she just got a hit song some months ago. She's from Colombia and sings mostly in Spanish, I doubt she would have any chance to get attention without Spotify help
