#191: The Future of Online Music

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2017

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Internet has changed a lot over the past 20 years, and so has the music industry. CDs and record stores have been replaced by streaming and the iTunes store. While consumers are benefitting from more content and ways to listen to music than ever before, prominent artists like Taylor Swift have lamented declining revenues for artists in the digital age, even taking their gripes to the halls of Congress. Is streaming a viable future for online music, or will online piracy and low royalties spoil the party? Are websites like YouTube doing enough to combat copyright infringement? Evan is joined by Steven Marks, Chief of Digital Business & General Counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). For a different perspective on copyright, listen to episode #176.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Swardstraver. On today's show, Internet Copyright and the Future of the Music Industry, regular listeners of this program may have heard our first episode on copyright recently with Mike Maznick, the editor of TechDirt, where we discussed online copyright and some of the big debates
0:24.5	that are going on. What responsibility do platforms like YouTube and Google have to remove infringing
0:30.7	content? But how can we do that in a way that doesn't stifle free speech or disrupt the internet
0:35.4	economy? There are a lot of competing interests here.
0:41.6	I wanted to get a different perspective than the one I got last time. So joining me to discuss this important topic is Stephen Marks, Chief of Digital Business and General Counsel for the
0:46.3	Recording Industry Association of America that is better known as RIAA. Stephen, thanks so much for
0:51.3	joining the show. Thanks for having me. So to start off, who are the members of RIAA?
0:57.0	The members of RIA are hundreds of record labels, including the major recorded companies
1:01.6	and the labels that they work with and distribute.
1:05.9	And before we get into all the various copyright disputes, what exactly is the state of the music industry
1:11.8	today? So the state of the industry is good in that we have seen last year for the first time
1:20.3	in a very long time growth in the industry. So if we just kind of rewind a little bit for some context, the industry today is about
1:31.5	half of what it was in terms of total revenues back in 1999. So you've had this steady decline for
1:39.6	about 15 years, about five years or so ago, revenues flattened. And then just in the last two years,
1:48.1	and especially in 2016, we saw some real growth in the industry. And that's been mainly
1:56.0	from streaming and in particular paid subscriptions from streaming.
2:01.2	And what do you see as the reason for that decline?
2:04.2	Is it as simple as just saying that the Internet came along and that just hit your revenues?
2:09.3	Or is it something more?
2:11.2	I think it's a number of different things.
2:13.0	I mean, clearly the Internet was part of it and the way that people consume music was different.
2:18.4	So you had an album world going to a singles world.
	...

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