According to a recent article from Billboard’s Business News category, these are 5 out of 10 of the biggest music business stories and trends of 2022 that stood out to us. The article was created by Dan Rys (@danrys), a senior writer at Billboard covering the music business. Over the past decade, his work has appeared in and been highlighted by The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, Vice and Hot Press magazine. Prior to Billboard, he worked as the senior editor of XXL.
- Despite Complications, the Music Business is Thriving
- It’s been a complicated year for the music industry overall, as the return from COVID-19 has been a rollercoaster ride, breaking new artists has become harder than ever these days and overarching financial issues like inflation and the possibility of a recession have cooled what had been a really hot market. But despite those challenges, the music business has been growing on almost all fronts for another year. The touring business has already been covered, but the music business in the U.S. also saw on-demand audio streams surpass 1 trillion for the first time ever — this is a 611% increase from 2015, according to Luminate. Despite supply chain issues that continue to negatively affect record labels and manufacturers, vinyl sales passed $1 billion in revenue for the first time since the mid-1980s! At the midyear mark, they were up more than 22% — well before Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” album set the record for largest vinyl sales week since Luminate began tracking data in 1991. Overall consumption is up another 9.2% year over year so far in 2022, with no signs of slowing down.
- The Industry is Still Obsessed with TikTok
- Love it or hate it, TikTok’s influence is not a debate. People are spending the most time across all social platforms on TikTok scrolling. The music industry was as obsessed with TikTok in 2022 as it’s ever been, and the ByteDance-owned social media platform has leaned further than ever before into its connections to the music biz — for better or worse, depending on who you ask. TikTok has a lot to do with the mega success of hits both old (Kate Bush’s “Running Up that Hill,” Frank Ocean’s “Lost”) and new (Lizzo’s “About Damn Time,” Bebe Rexha and David Guetta’s “I’m Good”) while helping break new artists like Em Beihold and Cafuné. But the record labels’ love affair with TikTok has, over the past year, cooled down, as breaking a hit has become more complicated and the marketing pluses that it offered have fizzled a bit. A distribution play from the platform called SoundOn was met with a lukewarm reaction, while a ByteDance streaming service, Resso, has rolled out in select markets, with rumors that it could come to the U.S. soon — if TikTok can ease the concerns of U.S. government officials.
- The Rush Towards Services
- While one sector of the business is running toward catalog ownership, another sector is running in the opposite direction: toward services, or partnering with artists and labels to provide a backbone of support to help them achieve their goals without giving up ownership through distribution, marketing, press releases/publicity, promotions, royalty claiming and other services. The independent music distribution space has generally been a logical business model for decades, but the rush into services ramped up in the past year. Companies like TikTok, SoundCloud, Tencent and Downtown embraced the shift with realigned business models, joining relatively new entrants to the space like UnitedMasters, Stem and Utopia.
- Web3 projects exploded and folded
- Early in the year, Web3 projects exploded in what seemed like every sector of the music business, including all three major labels along with Spotify, Gibson, Coachella, Ticketmaster, the Grammys and Death Row Records — not to mention artists like Snoop Dogg, Steve Aoki, Pharrell and Keith Richards. Universal Music Group launched an NFT band, Warner Music Group partnered with a bunch of web3 companies, Snoop Dogg bought Death Row Records and promised to make it a record label involved with NFTs; the possibilities in the metaverse seemed endless. But the flight proved to be much more turbulent than many had expected, and a series of selloffs and financial failures, as well as recession fears and inflation, brought in what many called “the Crypto Winter”, with sales and enthusiasm dwindling as the year went on. By the time the second-biggest crypto exchange, FTX, failed in a big way in November, there had been a 70%-80% cool-off in the market, to the point where the once-ubiquitous format seemed ready for another hibernation while the industry tries to figure out how best to take advantage of the metaverse.
- BTS Break Rattles Music Biz — And HYBE Stock
- BTS has been one of the biggest acts of any genre in the past several years, as big as the beatles, racking up No. 1 hits, big-name collaborations, massive box office grosses and accounting for nearly one-third of the entire K-pop market in the U.S. since 2021, according to the data company Luminate. So the group’s decision to take a break to work on solo projects was a blow to the group’s management company, label and agency HYBE, which saw its stock, already down 45% for the year at that point, tank 27% in the week after the announcement. (Shares recovered a bit after closing at 145,000 won following the announcement, hitting a low of 107,000 on Oct. 13 and rebounding to 157,000 as of Dec. 12.) With the BTS group members facing the possibility of mandatory service in the South Korean military, HYBE is facing an uncertain outlook for 2023, despite third-quarter growth and the possibility of positive returns from BTS members’ solo projects. We’re looking forward to seeing this biopic one day because this sounds like a Hollywood movie script!
