CDs used to be crazy expensive. They cost much more than what was reasonable. Today I have access to untold thousands of records for €10 per month. That money (non inflation adjusted) would have bought me only a single record back in the day.
One could argue that the current price of music is too low. But the price they tried to extract back then was completely unreasonable and I think those excesses contributed heavily to the current situation.
> But the price they tried to extract back then was completely unreasonable and I think those excesses contributed heavily to the current situation.
Yes that left incurable trauma. During late 90s to early 00s CD costed the same in Germany and in any post-communist country whose economies were in shambles. Something around 12 EUR which would be 18 EUR inflation adjusted now. I was wandering between shelves like a pariah and asking shop assistant like a beggar to insert the CD into the player so I could listen it in shop for few minutes. Music industry worked hard to make enemies for life.
Everyone pirated in the Eastern Europe back then. You bought a CD only if you were a big fan of the band. The rest was downloaded off the net. I've never bought a single CD in my life. Transitioned straight from pirating to Spotify.
Ha! the dial up internet was ruled by extortionist state monopoly and local ISPs were plagued with equipment thievery... the only way to acquire pirated music was physically exchanging hard drives with acquaintances.
They weren't, iTunes (and other services before that) existed before Steam. The music industry was ahead of the games industry, not the other way round. The difference is that video game DRM (Steam) succeeded, but music DRM didn't.
> CDs used to be crazy expensive. They cost much more than what was reasonable.
A market economy determines the value of goods by what people are willing to pay for it. Apparently, halfing the record price would not have doubled the sales, so the vinyl/CD price reflected the value of the music pretty well. But nowadays, legal music streaming has to compete against illegal piracy, which is free and only a little inconvenient, so the streaming price is forced to a very low level. Musicians can hardly make money from music sales anymore. If you make a type of music that isn't well suited for concerts, and you aren't massively popular, you are screwed.
That's true, but the music market is special in some ways.
* Artificial scarcity. Recorded music is a scarce good only because the law says so. You wouldn't download a car and so on.
* Non-fungibility. Music isn't all the same. Customers want a record with their favourite artist and not just any record of similar "quality".
There was a very limited time in human history where musicians could get rich by only selling recorded music. The norm otherwise has been that musicians earn money from live performances and now we're almost back to that. I'm not sure I think that's a bad thing.
> * Artificial scarcity. Recorded music is a scarce good only because the law says so. You wouldn't download a car and so on
But this scarcity is good. It enables, or would enable, production of music which wouldn't otherwise be produced. If music piracy weren't so much an issue today, the music industry size would probably be several times its current size (it would have simply grown with the rest of the economy, as it did ik the 90s) which would mean far more musicians could earn a living with their work. Especially musicians which make a type of music which isn't well suited for concerts. As a consequence, a lot of this music simply doesn't get made today. Yes, we instead got impossibly cheap Spotify (I don't think cheap flat rate streaming would have ever become a thing if it wasn't for piracy making actually selling tracks near impossible), but we also got less music, and consequently, less good music.
Compare this to the video game market, where piracy isn't as big of a problem as in music, due to much larger file sizes and better copy protection. Many of the great games we have couldn't have been made if video game piracy was significantly more common.
There are more than 100M tracks on Spotify. More that one person can listen to over several lifetimes. Even if 99% of them are crap - that still leaves 1M of good tracks. The amount of available music is simply staggering nowadays.
It's not obvious that a larger market translates to higher quality supply. Certainly greater supply, but someone who's profit-motivated and is trying to capture more of the market would probably do better producing easy and diverse content in large quantities.
Yeah, it really was way too expensive. A single with one or two remixes or other songs did cost 5€. Linkin Parks Meteora did cost me 19€ and Reanimation 16.50€. Double CD samplers were around 25€ to 30€.
I'm happy with streaming but I'm also happy to buy a vinyl to additionally support my favourite artists, even when it costs 30-40€.
One could argue that the current price of music is too low. But the price they tried to extract back then was completely unreasonable and I think those excesses contributed heavily to the current situation.