Commercially successful popular musicians used to make most of their money out of vinyl sales, albums and singles throughout the 1950s to 1980s. Touring used to be commercially significant for promotion purposes – to increase record sales and consequently to increase overall earnings. Then in the 1990s P2P file sharing came along, then Napster and similar offerings by the turn of the millennium. The record industry tried to put the genie back in the bottle using feelings of guilt, threats and lawsuits, which failed. You cannot un-invent the improved technology which consumers like. So, in the new millennium the music industry jumped onboard, with Apple Music and Spotify and others, and started to charge us for music streaming, which had been free but mostly illegal in the previous decade. Belatedly, the industry changed direction and started to make money from the same type internet sharing that they previously opposed. The sales value of music was diminished in the process and consumers could listen to more recorded music for a lower price, in the process consuming more and spending more money overall than before. The music industry made money but the musicians and bands were struggling financially so concerts and touring became a way for bands (and the music industry) to make money and that continues today. The music they play is often much more faithful to the recorded versions than it used to be and the public apparently consider themselves sufficiently entertained if they can jump around to familiar recreations of catchy hits and shoot jumpy short videos (usually in TikTok ready portrait mode) or take photos to put onto social media to demonstrate to others that they had this experience of a live concert and are ‘living their best life’ or something like that.
More recently, a similar thing seems to be happening to visual entertainment: movies and television programs. These are mass-produced by enormously wealthy and powerful corporations, are now available in bulk, on demand, once again streaming more content at a cheaper price to the consumer. The genie is once again out of the bottle – the technological change this time is on-demand streaming, Netflix and the like. Once again the performing artists are complaining as their predecessors did with the decline of vinyl record sales in the 1990s. Currently Hollywood actors are on strike; however maybe the hard truth is that what they do has been devalued by technological change, again to the benefit of the consumer and benefiting the already rich owners of capital and increasing shareholder profit growth. Some performers are already embracing the change and either talking about or actually licensing their own image for deep fake or AI generated entertainment. Other are trying to put the genie back into the bottle while talking about the integrity of their art and the magic of cinema, for example Tarantino talking about the illusion of film which is a series of still pictures to create the illusion of movement and how this is lost using digital movie cameras. They may be right in a way but the technology for change is already here and the winners among the performers are likely to be the ones who embrace the new way of delivering entertainment to consumers and who find new ways for performers to share in the profits.