DOWNLOAD VIDEO
Melissa Etheridge is taking her 35-year music career in a new direction this year with “This is M.E.,” an album she released under her self-owned label.
Etheridge became famous in the 1980s for her hits “Ain’t It Heavy” and “Come to my Window,” songs whose raw honesty became characteristic of her music. With her new release, Etheridge wanted to create an album with staying power among her listeners, she said.
The singer has seen drastic changes in the music industry in the past few decades as the rise of digital sales has transformed the way audiences listen to music. Music subscription platforms generated over $1.1 billion in 2013 as overall music sales decreased by four percent, and industry experts are
calling
streaming the future of the music industry.
Major players in the technology world have also played a role by buying and developing streaming services. In 2014, Apple bought Beats for $3 billion with plans to remake its music service and Google paid between $15 and $39 million for Songza, an online music curator.
But companies are still grappling with how to profit from an online audience. Spotify, the streaming service that boasts 50 million users, has lost $200 million since its founding. Some of this loss comes from fees to record labels for the rights to stream their music, a move that some artists criticize as insufficient. Taylor Swift pulled her entire catalog from Spotify after a dispute earlier this year.
Moreover, Spotify
generates
most of its revenue from online subscriptions, but those only account for about a quarter of its listeners. The number of unpaid listeners can make it difficult for artists to know who is hearing their music, but releasing an album on her own allowed her a more direct connection, Etheridge said.
Warm up questions
- What do you know about Spotify?
- Where do you get your music from? Which music services do you like the most and least? Explain your answer.
Critical thinking questions
- Do you think it was smart of Apple and Google to buy Beats and Songza (respectively)? Why or why not? Explain your answer.
- How do businesses make money from free music services?
- Music subscription services generated over $1.1 billion in 2013 as overall music sales decreased by four percent. What do these two numbers say about people’s attitudes toward those services?
