Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yup. Let's take a moment to talk about the decline of the music industry and then I want to talk a little bit about how the royalties actually work in streaming. First of all, the music industry peaked in 1999 with about $14, $15 billion in recorded music revenues. This is shipping CDs, basically. When you look at this line, and we'll link to the RIAA's wonderful tableau diagram of this, it is 90% plus shipping CDs. That was a goldmine for the music industry and then it started declining. Very clearly, Napster happened and then it fell like crazy. I'm looking at 2005. It was at $12 billion, and then just five years later, it's at $7 billion in 2009. CD sales fall like crazy, music streaming hasn't really kicked in yet. There's just no money being made, and the all-time low for the entire music industry for recorded revenues was $7 billion in 2014 and 2015. It's right around this time where streaming hasn't started generating real revenues yet, the industry has basically been flat to declining for the last six, seven years. It's brutal out there. What Taylor’s sort of looking at is if we continue to put all our eggs in the streaming basket, I don't know. Why is she saying, I don't know? Let's resume our previous conversation from when we were talking about the different types of licenses and the different types of copyrights. I can't wait, let's do it.…

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