![]() In 1995, The New York Times broke down how a CD’s revenue was then distributed: “35 percent of the retail price goes to the store, 27 percent to the record company, 16 percent to the artist, 13 percent to the manufacturer and 9 percent to the distributor.” Record companies enjoyed a healthy margin by that reckoning, taking in about $4.31 on a $15.99 CD. ![]() Physical formats, especially CDs, are significantly marked up, to pay for a complex, physical supply chain and the shady habits of record executives. It was also helping to wipe out the major labels’ profit margins. In doing so, Apple wasn’t just putting Tower out of business. Apple wrenched the music purchasing business away from complacent brick and mortar retail by way of a better selection, shop-from-home convenience, instant gratification, and lower prices. Until the 2000s, that product was a vinyl record, CD, or tape from Tower Records or your neighborhood record store.Īfter the debut of the iPod, Apple gained a dominant market share in that same business. How Streaming Saved Record Companiesįor the first 100 years of the recording industry, we would buy a product from a store and let it take up space. That radical, slow-motion transition to a new business model staved off an existential crisis-and is essential to understanding how our listening habits have changed. Since 2010, the record industry has become a music rental business, rather than a music selling business. Today, listeners rent music instead of buying it. On the bus, I’d plug my headphones into my iPhone and do the same thing.īut I haven’t played a song stored on my hard drive in iTunes or on my iPhone 11 for at least that long. When I was working or gaming on my computer, I would open iTunes and play the whole library on shuffle, skipping around until I heard something that met my whim. Most importantly, my iTunes collection contains hundreds of curios and rarities that I picked up somewhere or another. Dilla, Sleater-Kinney, Miles Davis, Al Green, Nirvana, Amy Winehouse, Wayne Shorter, and UGK. It contains the complete discographies of The Beatles, P-Funk, Nas, Jay-Z, Built to Spill, J. ![]() That’s 106.01 gigs of music that would take 59 days, 14 hours, and 24 minutes to play sequentially. The result: my iTunes library has 20,525 song files formatted in AAC, MP3, and MPEG. I overheated several CD-R drives and slowed down bandwidth for hours at a time to put it together, over the course of more than a decade. ![]() The downloads all came from the iTunes store, and only from the iTunes store-not anywhere else, I promise. The files came from CDs I ripped from my own collection, the library, new and used bins at record stores, and my friends’ car portfolios. It expanded to the edges of the latest version of the iPod, as it gradually grew from 5 GB to 10 to 50 to 120. ![]() Like a goldfish, my collection grew to fill the space that allowed it. The iPod that I stocked was filled to capacity with top-shelf music. ![]()
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