Ben Gilbert: observation

Transcript context

…And we're going to help you do everything. Yeah, sure. Where does this leave us? Basically, what it means is the industry is just going to have to make it up on volume. But because streaming pays out so much less, we're just going to need a lot more streams. Now is this going to happen? Here's where there's an interesting argument. The Donald Passman book is so good in bringing up two points in the introduction. These two points were at the peak in 1999. An average CD buyer spends about $45 per year on CDs. Today, with streaming averaging $7 a month, that average spend per customer has gone up to $84. You have almost a 2X in terms of consumer spend. Now let's look at the number of consumers that are doing this. In the old days, when you were done with your 20s, you basically stopped buying records and you stopped buying CDs. You had your musical taste, you had your collection, you weren't really listening to the new stuff anymore, and you certainly weren't buying it. You only ever heard it on the radio, which was free. Today, people of all ages are paying for streaming every month from four-year-olds listening to stuff that four-year-olds listen to on Spotify, all the way to grandma having a Spotify subscription. I can confirm, children like music.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.