People don't buy music anymore. There's no point.
Why buy the Ariana Grande album when you can stream it on Spotify? Why pay for the new Sleater-Kinney release when it's online on NPR's First Listen before it comes out? Unless a person firmly believes in supporting the arts and musicians, there's really not much of a reason to pay for music, because it is everywhere. For free.
Nothing makes this point more clearly than the Nielsen report on music for 2014, which looks at music sales, listening, and artist impact for the calendar year of 2014. The report explains that sales for the year are down in every category except vinyl and streaming.
But that doesn't mean the music industry is dying.
Sales in 2014 were down across the board
It's not just CDs. Purchases of music in the form of digital albums and digital singles were also down across the board in 2014.
"Music fans continue to consume music through on-demand streaming services at record levels, helping to offset some of the weakness that we see in sales," David Bakula, SVP Industry Insights for Nielsen, states in the report.
Bakula is right, streaming seems to be the way of the future. 164 billion songs were played on-demand via streaming in 2014, that's up 54 percent from 2013. But consuming music and purchasing music are two totally different ballgames. We don't hear the head of Nielsen proclaiming the value of piracy to the music community, because that doesn't make a profit for the industry. The way we buy music is changing, and purchases of music are what matter to the future of the industry:
The only two sectors of purchasing that were up in 2014 were streaming and vinyl. Streaming is currently the topic of a hot debate within the industry. Artists feel like they aren't being paid well by streaming, and Taylor Swift even pulled out of Spotify this year. There are two cases currently before the Department of Justice about the revenue from streaming. No one — not artists or labels or publishers or songwriters — can agree on whether streaming is good or bad for them.
And vinyl? Vinyl isn't the future of music. It's the past.
Vinyl is a niche market, not a sales model
"The continued expansion of digital music consumption is encouraging, as is the continued record-setting growth that we are seeing in vinyl LP sales," Bakula said in the report. But should the rise of vinyl really be encouraging to a market that has lost its sales identity?
Vinyl's sales rose 52 percent in 2014, according to the Nielsen Music Report, but the format's total contribution to the market is miniscule. Some people will point to the rising vinyl market as a sign of music's vitality. But the return of vinyl isn't a way to save the music industry, and it certainly isn't the dominant way that people are consuming music. Here's a chart of vinyl's sales since the 70s.
Like books, DVDs, and comics, vinyl is a form of physical media that's seeing a resurgence in popularity as physical media becomes a novelty good — something collectors can stockpile and appreciate. The problem with vinyl — in addition to not sounding as clean as digital music — is that it's not transportable.
Listeners can't enjoy vinyl records at work or in the car, which severely cuts down the amount of time that people can consume music. What that means is that while vinyl sales may be growing, they will have an inevitable cap point.
At no point will Americans return to vinyl completely, which means that even if every American bought a record player today and spent the same amount of money they used to spend on CDs on vinyl, they would still be listening to music online through streaming platforms frequently.
People are still listening to music; there's just no clear path for the money.
Music listeners around the world haven't stopped listening to music just because there are infinite other forms of media to consume.
According to the Nielsen report, 93 percent of Americans spend more than 25 hours each week listening to music. That's more than half of a full-time work week spent consuming music. (This was the first time research has been conducted on American's listening habits.) This makes sense when you think about the number of hours Americans spend in the office or on their daily commute.
Listeners streamed over 164 billion songs on-demand in 2014. The conversation around streaming's place in the future of music is often considered part of a doomsday narrative. Digital music can be accessed immediately, listened to for very cheaply, and shared with the click of a button. How the industry chooses to move forward in this new world will determine the stability of the market in 20 years.
But one thing's for certain: even if the market stabilizes completely, vinyl is never going to be the dominant way consumers listen to music. It's too limited. The future is online. Somewhere.