The RIAA (Recording Industry Association Of America) have released a detailed report breaking down the wholesale and retail sales of recorded music for 2016 in the United States. While still down to half of what it was in 1999, there has been a trend of actual growth in the music industry as of late, with $7.7 billion in estimated retail revenues reported—up from $6.9 billion in 2015.
The bulk of that growth is attributed to streaming services, particularly to royalties earned from paid memberships on services such as Apple Music, Spotify and more. In fact, 2016 represents the first time that revenues from streaming platforms accounted for the majority of revenue, with 51.4% of 2016’s sales being attributed to it.
Physical sales and digital downloads continued to slump however with physical sales down to 21.8% and digital downloads/ringtones sitting at 24.1%. You can read the whole report in PDF form via riaa.com. In an accompanying post on Medium, RIAA Chariman/CEO Cary Sherman expressed concerns regarding the report, while also singling out YouTube for allegedly low royalty rates. He stated:
“It makes no sense that it takes a thousand on-demand streams of a song for creators to earn $1 on YouTube, while services like Apple and Spotify pay creators $7 or more for those same streams. Why does this happen? Because a platform like YouTube wrongly exploits legal loopholes to pay creators at rates well below the true value of music while other digital services—including many new and small innovators—cannot. It may be the same song requested by the user, on the same device, but the payouts differ enormously because of an unfair and out-of-date legal regime.”