Survey: Music Sales Are Just 6% of Average Musician’s Income (U.S.)

[lostcontrol_]

http://torrentfreak.com/music-sales-...income-130114/

An interesting survey/read regarding a musicians income from different aspects of the business, with 5000 U.S. musicians interviewed.

The TorrentFreak article takes more notice on the copyright side of the survey, but there's a lot more than that in the actual paper (link in the article).

[boynamedsuse]

That is a very interesting article. It is not what I would expect, but after seeing the data, it does make sense.

[oniman7]

How many musicians do you personally know that make more than a couple thousand a year on music sales? I'm willing to bet most are paid for gigs and recording sessions, if not private lessons.

[pklima]

Not really surprising. I quit trying to sell recorded music about five years ago. I am kinda surprised by how tiny merchandise is. Between hardcore band shirts and Shakira fragrances I'd expect that to amount to more.

Will have to read the whole paper a bit later.

[pklima]

Still haven't read the whole paper, but Figure 5 is one to take a look at. It breaks down the income by genre, so you can see the breakdowns for jazz and rock/pop (which put together add up to only 11.7% of all survey respondents, but probably most of the people on this forum).

[pklima]

Finished going through the paper. It's worth reading the whole thing. It turns out that rock and pop are a lot more than 11.7%- rock/alt rock is 7.2% and pop 4.5%, but then there are dozens of other categories like indie at 2.2%, country at 1.8%, funk at 0.4% which all together add up to 44% of the whole. So, that makes a lot more sense.