The financialization of music production and the Internet revolution
At the dawn of the third millennium, music production is becoming a key asset for the music industry majors. Falling revenues following the decline in compact-disc sales soon whetted the appetites of major groups and independents alike. The majors saw new opportunities in this form of publishing, which was little affected by piracy due in large part to the emergence of the mp3 standard, and which generated a veritable crisis in recorded music during the decade from 2003 to 2013. This crisis, the true dark years of phonographic publishing, which will only be resolved with the emergence of legal download and streaming platforms, will be an opportunity for the music majors to position themselves in a buoyant but hitherto underestimated market compared to their “core business”, i.e. pop, rock and urban music.
Among other factors, the competition generated by the arrival of new players will have a direct and beneficial impact on the musical quality of music production. Both in terms of musical writing and recording production, which had already made considerable progress from the 90s onwards, gradually catching up with commercial music. The growing concern for novelty, efficiency and originality, in the context of competition between the most representative companies, explains this creativity. On the other hand, an ever-increasing volume of production is responding to growing customer demand.
In 2005, the BMG Production Music Group is releasing a new album every day, thanks to its various production centers spread across its international subsidiaries.
With the decline of the compact disc in the early 2000s, replaced by online music distribution, the trend towards overproduction is one of the most striking phenomena in the evolution of the sector. It’s much simpler and, above all, less costly to build up a publishing catalog without the cost of pressing and shipping large numbers of CDs. In fact, CDs produced by production music publishers were sent free of charge to thousands of users. Some albums released in the 90s had print runs of up to 15,000 copies, which meant that pressing, storage and logistics costs were high.
This phenomenon of overproduction is also due to falling recording costs, following the development of the technical resources available to home studios, as well as the arrival on the market of new composers who came to music production following the decline in sales of compact discs and investments in commissioned music for cinema and advertising, or the financing of concerts by record producers.
This situation naturally encouraged many candidates to enter the music production sector, which became a new Eldorado for the music industry in the 2000s.
It’s worth noting that, before the advent of the Internet, the largest music production catalogs did not exceed one thousand albums, i.e. around twenty thousand titles. Today, the various online distribution platforms feature catalogs ranging from three hundred thousand to six hundred thousand titles. Since market potential has not grown in proportion to supply, the result has been a dilution of usage and, consequently, of revenue.