Tom Silverman, industry veteran and founder of Tommy Boy Records, recently tossed down the gauntlet to all the industry doomsayers: The numbers are in, and the music industry is recovering from its low point (which Silverman says hit in February 2010).
Silverman points hopefully to growing sales for everything from vinyl records to digital “albums,” to the continuing interest in physical CDs, and to rising amounts of li censing and royalty fees—including those collected from digital and non-traditional broadcasters. Instead of an inevitable demise, the music industry appears to be experiencing a transitional moment, the kind that shook up the business several times over the course of history.
Social media platforms—YouTube in particular—seem to be playing a major part in driving this boom, in particular in the “discovery” of new artists. How all this plays out for "global" music remains to be seen: While more and more artists seem poised to break into once unimaginable media spaces, the deepening of online trusted sources and recommendation engines seems to be taking longer for global sounds than indie rock.
See Silverman’s full post here, complete with lots of very cool charts and graphs.
