I have seen recently that live gear prices both new and second hand have plummeted. I recently reviewed the Anker C200 webcam and I held off that review for a couple of months because of how the prices of things was all over the place. I was asking lots of people about things, general music and livestreaming trends and gear prices and I’m now ready to share my findings with you!
One of the strange things that has happened is that physical sales are up for the first time in around 20 years. Now I was pretty happy when I looked at that until I dug a bit deeper, and this is what I found out. Yes physical sales are up with small increases over last year, but the issue here is that sales have fallen to such a low level that this small increase isn’t as great news as people think. Take a moment to read the article below and I will discuss why I think it’s not all good news afterwards!
https://www.musicweek.com/labels/read/physical-music-sales-on-course-for-first-increase-in-20-years/090124
The increase in sales is nice to see, but that hides the major problem here. Sales are still awful overall. With yearly sales of the major releases in the hundreds of thousands compared to the millions but streaming up, the total plays still seems healthy. But this masks that most people are NOT paying for the streaming side of things like the did just a year or 2 back with most having a “free” account or using say youtube to play songs with the associated ads. Yes Spotify has increased its user base by 4% according to some reports but its premium user base has dropped to 40% meaning the majority don’t pay for the service. This meant that last year Spotify made a loss of around $446 million. This, of course, is not sustainable but it does include around 20% staff reductions last year and the deals that were made over the last 2 years being over priced. Spotify has also reduced how much it pays artists yet again to try and make money because of the decline in premium membership. What this means for music is that despite numbers being up, artists are overall receiving less money and the figures are for 2023 not 2024 which has brought new challenges with the rise of AI music generation. The articles are not focussed on this new threat and are of course out of date, and my finding are that despite last year having an increase sales have dropped again this year because of financial pressures, but also because the music industry itself has had a shift because people are not only thinking that they will struggle to make money from music, but that moving forward the music industry has had another big decline. It is these facts that have made gear sales fall and thus making gear prices decline as well. I spoke to a few retailers and they all said that sales are down. People aren’t buying new gear, plenty are selling off their gear and this has meant that new and used prices are down!
I recently took a look at a retailer in the UK called Andertons because I was looking at buying something from Behringer. The reason I have mentioned this is because Behringer already has low prices and was (I thought) selling well. It came as a big surprise to see that most Behringer gear was either at lower than recommended prices or on sale, so I asked around. The answers shocked me, as most retailers said that they had unsold stock and sales were the poorest they’d been for a few years and that the effective boost that covid had brought as people were inside a lot and bought new gear was over. Plenty also said that a lot of people had sold the gear they got during the pandemic and had gone back to other pursuits, with many saying that they couldn’t see their hobby continuing or the bubble for making music due to AI and other pressures meaning they had sold up. The following screen grab is just a small view of Behringer items showing how they are at below the prices for what I expected with even new items selling for lower than I expect at this stage (ie pretty new and in demand)
If Behringer items, which are at the budget end of the market are struggling then it figures that the high end stuff must be as well, but I found it harder to find out figures for them. All I got was most said sales were slow but OK – not very positive at all. This points to how depressed the music industry is again and the outlook was not positive at all, with most saying they expected a tough year and the same for the next couple of years. Not good at all I’m afraid! Now we have seen this before, we will see it again, but I have spoken to people who are saying how the CD recovery is great, they will be around for ever etc. I’m not so sure at all – music sales overall are very low, and from what I’ve been told last years increase has already been overturned this year after 8 months and is still decreasing. Disposable income pressure is really telling this year around the world and well gear is not the same as food and electricity is it.
So to finish up here – I’d like to say that the music industry is in rude health, but that appears to be far from the truth. What I can say is that there is little optimism moving forward – this isn’t confined to music though as in general there doesn’t appear to be much positivity out there right now. 2023 showed some nice changes, but as far as I can tell – and most people were reluctant to say much really – 2024 has reversed the bright outlook quite quickly. I’d like to be proven wrong but I can see that we are coming along to another change in things in 2024 and beyond. I cannot emphasise enough how AI has shook up negatively the music industry, film industry and heck the whole tech side of things badly in 2024. The push back of AI being in everything is huge right now. You know it is bad when over 50% of adverts seem to mention AI these days like phone ads…
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