Two staggering pieces of research have come to light in the last couple of months, the latest one from PRS showed that according to their figures live music grossed more than recorded music last year for the first time ever. PRS are the Publishing Rights Society and so in theory they are informed every time a piece of music is recorded so that appropriate royalties can be paid to the writers. Likewise bands are meant to submit sets lists and pay a fee every time they do a show so that appropriate royalties can be paid out to the song’s creators. Now we all know that until you hit a certain ‘level’ in the industry none of this actually happens but the fact that the data is taken from the bands and artists making the majority of the money does illustrate the trend. The cause of it has to be a mixture of the huge shift away from physical music sales in the last 5-10 years, the rapid increase in piracy that this has made possible and the introduction of streamed solutions like Last.fm and Spotify. Couple this with the resurgence of the live market as the mainstream bands find further ways to extort more money out of us for the big shows (VVIP boxes anyone?) and it was really only a matter of time before this happened.

The other piece of research that seems to further hammer home the argument comes from the partner of PRS the MCPS who deal with all the mechanical licensing for music. Their research showed that of the 1.23m albums available only 173,000 titles were actually purchased, that’s a staggering 80% that never sold a single copy! Again some of this data will be flawed due to the ‘off the record’ way that a lot of independent music is sold but even allowing for a generous margin of error it’s still a sobering illustration of the challenge facing independent artists.

As we’ve often said on this site, the challenge used to be getting signed so you can get the album recorded. In the current music industry climate however the challenge isn’t the recording, now anyone can do that, the challenge is getting your work heard and more importantly paid for!