Now, for absolutely nothing I can record a song, make a video and release the song on all digital platforms. Who knows who will see it. And I am doing this right now. When else were aspiring musicians like me able to do this in the past?
Exciting times for sure!
Yes, the upside is you can do your own release to a global audience for very little money, how cool is that?
The downside is not much in the way of money to be made.
It wasn't so much the fact that anyone can just make their own copies of music on their computer to load onto an MP3 player that killed the money aspect of it based on my experience, it is all the new streaming services out there. MP3 players are obsolete, most people just stream these days.
When I first started with CDBaby back in 2003 things were quite different. Initially it was physical CD sales, but that changed very quickly to MP3 downloads via the various partners, iTunes etc. And that was a good thing, there was much more money to be made (via CDBaby) with an MP3 download than a CD sale.
In checking my CDBaby accounting page it looks like the trend from someone buying an MP3 download to just buying a stream started happening around 2006, that is the last year I was consistently selling a lot of MP3 downloads, after that it is mostly streams. MP3 downloads pay the artist around $.77 or so, streams $.009.
Not that I made a lot of money from it mind you, but for the first few years I was able to pay for my BIAB yearly upgrade with a few $$ left over from money made from CDBaby.
But, that's just the way technology has changed the industry and not likely to change anytime soon.
My $.02 for what it's worth
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