Monday, November 2, 2015

Revenue Stability in the Music Market - Materials from Cedar Boschan's October Presentation at The University of Southern California Posted

Our founder Cedar Boschan had a great time speaking last month at the University of Southern California's 2015 Institute on Entertainment Law and Business.  The topic was "The Search for Revenue Stability in the Evolving Music Market."
Image courtesy of NARIP (c) 2015 L-R: Tess Taylor, President of NARIP, Todd Brabec, Esq., author of "Music, Money & Success," Cedar Boschan of Boschan Corp., Kent Liu, Esq. of Rhino Entertainment

Ms. Boschan was honored to serve as a panelist at her alma mater (USC conferred Ms. Boschan's bachelor of science in music industry), where her instructors included fellow speaker Todd Brabec, attorney and co-author of the classic, "Music, Money & Success."  


Images courtesy of NARIP (c) 2015 Top, L-R: Tess Taylor, President of NARIPThomas White, program chair, Kent Liu, Esq. of Rhino Entertainment, Anita Rivas, Esq., materials chair, Todd Brabec, Esq., author of "Music, Money & Success," Cedar Boschan of Boschan Corp. 
Following the panel discussion, many audience members requested copies of Ms. Boschan's presentation.  Due to overwhelming demand, our sister site, Boschan.com today posted the presentation images as well as some written materials that were included in the materials that attendees of the USC event received.

Since Auditrix readers may find Ms. Boschan's presentation of interest, we are including a link here:

Note: During the time since Cedar prepared the above-linked materials, updated music publishing revenues figures were released by the NMPA and CISAC.  Therefore, don't miss Cedar Boschan's next music industry presentation for the most up-to-date analysis.

Monday, October 19, 2015

Visualizing Decimated Revenue in the Record Business

Since 1999, the old "record business" (i.e., of manufacturing and distributing physical consumer products) has dropped over 70%.  See charts below based on RIAA data:






Record companies collectively lost control of music distribution, albums unbundled into tracks, and downloads have had their day (note: downloads are declining in market share at this point). 

A small number of digital music services have seized control of music distribution; YouTube, Spotify, Amazon and Pandora compete with Apple to offer consumers better, faster and/or cheaper experiences, making streaming one of few recorded music market segments with strong growth.

Losing control of distribution to digital companies has weighed heavily on music license fees, resulting in controversially low royalty rates, which are often based on subscriber or ad revenues. See Boschan Corp.’s estimates below of roughly how many digital downloads or streams are required to achieve $1 Million in US recorded music revenue on many of the popular services:

Note that actual rates do vary based on the services deals with record companies and/or SoundExchange as well as the type of exploitation (e.g., subscriptions vs. ad-supported).

Also, it is important to note that while recorded music revenues have dropped, so have costs (e.g., for physical product), and that record companies have a multitude of other income streams that they classify as "investment" or other types of income or offsets to costs.  As a result of these and other factors, the profitability picture is not quite as grim as it appears when we focus solely on revenues of the recorded music sector.