{"id":528590,"date":"2010-04-15T00:59:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-15T04:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20100413\/1647599007.shtml"},"modified":"2010-04-15T00:59:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-15T04:59:00","slug":"infographic-does-a-great-job-misrepresenting-opportunities-of-the-digital-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/528590","title":{"rendered":"Infographic Does A Great Job Misrepresenting Opportunities Of The Digital Era"},"content":{"rendered":"

This infographic depicts the number of sales<\/a> that must be made in order for a solo artist to make “minimum wage” in a month. The graphic is obviously meant to be a bit shocking, but even the slightest bit of digging turns it into more of a shoulder shrug. First of all, it is a bit misleading in that it compares not quite apples to oranges, but apples to apple slices to apple sauce to apple juice — all in one chart. It compares albums and singles and streams all on the same scale, which is a bit unfair. If you sell 1 album for $9.99 (that had 10 tracks on it), then of course you would expect to have to sell (roughly) 10 times as many tracks for $0.99 to make the same amount of money — that’s not really much of a revelation. By looking at the data<\/a>, we can compare apples to apples and get a better sense of what is going on:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
format<\/th>\naverage retail price<\/th>\nmusician revenue<\/th>\nsales to earn min. wage<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
Self-Pressed CD<\/td>\n$9.99<\/td>\n$8.09<\/td>\n143<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
iTunes Album Download<\/td>\n$9.99<\/td>\n0.94<\/td>\n1,229<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
cdbaby Album download<\/td>\n$9.99<\/td>\n7.49<\/td>\n155<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Retail Label-backed CD<\/td>\n$9.99<\/td>\n$0.30<\/td>\n3,871<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Clearly, it’s difficult to make a living simply by selling albums, but it’s always been that way. Musicians have long known that in order to make real money, they’d either have to be U2<\/em> big, or tour. However, it’s very interesting to note that in the new, digital era, artists actually make more<\/em> off of their album sales in iTunes than they did in the old, physical world. And selling albums digitally through cdbaby, without a label, stands to bring in much, much more money for the artist — and frees them from the headache of distributing a physical product. The band Pomplamoose, for example, is making a perfectly good living doing just that<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Moving on, the data claims that to make minimum wage, an artist would need 4.6M plays on a streaming service like Spotify. While that might be technically true, it’s a pretty meaningless calculation. It does not take into account the promotional value of streaming — and unlike selling 143 CDs, getting 4.6M plays of a digital track would certainly lead to significant revenue elsewhere. Surely an artist would be able to translate that much attention into successful live shows or their own CwF+RtB offering. After all, we’ve seen time<\/a> and time<\/a> again that focusing on something as narrow as money earned per track sold (or streamed play) is a limited way to view a musician’s earning potential. <\/p>\n

So, while at first glance, this infographic may seem pessimistic, digging a little deeper into the data gives the real story. Exciting opportunities still abound in the world of music for those creative enough to seize them.<\/p>\n

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This infographic depicts the number of sales that must be made in order for a solo artist to make “minimum wage” in a month. The graphic is obviously meant to be a bit shocking, but even the slightest bit of digging turns it into more of a shoulder shrug. First of all, it is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-528590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528590\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}