In the Greater Scheme of Things

To establish scale, it helps to understand that the music industry operates across two distinct economic worlds that are rarely discussed together.

The first is recorded music — what the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) measures annually. Global recorded music revenues reached $31.7 billion in 2025, marking the industry's eleventh consecutive year of growth. That figure encompasses streaming (which now accounts for nearly 70% of it), physical formats like vinyl and CDs, digital downloads, performance rights, and synchronization licensing. What it does not include is a single dollar from a concert ticket, a festival wristband, or a venue bar tab.

The second world is live music, and it is enormous in its own right. Global live music revenue reached approximately $35 billion in 2025, with the US market alone accounting for $18.5 billion of that. Critically, live performance represents roughly 50% of the total music economy — and for most working artists, it accounts for closer to 75% of their personal income.

This is the quiet structural reality of the streaming era: the recorded music "recovery" story benefits primarily labels and rights holders, while artists themselves depend on touring to survive. It explains, among other things, why concert ticket prices have risen so dramatically, and why an artist who publicly commits to keeping tickets affordable is making a financially meaningful sacrifice, not just a philosophical statement.

Combined recorded plus live puts the global music industry somewhere in the $65–70 billion range annually.

To put that in perspective: global GDP is roughly $117 trillion. The entire music industry represents less than 0.1% of global economic output. The oil and gas sector alone is approximately 60 times larger. Even within entertainment, music competes with gaming (a $200+ billion industry), film, sports, and social media platforms whose advertising revenues alone dwarf it.

And yet — music's cultural footprint is wildly disproportionate to its economic weight. In the US alone, the broader music ecosystem contributes an estimated $170 billion to annual GDP and supports roughly 2.5 million jobs when you account for the full downstream effect: tourism, hospitality, merchandise, licensing, and the countless local economies that exist because a tour came through town. But even that number understates the point. Economic metrics cannot capture what music actually does — how it shapes identity across generations, drives language, fashion, politics, and social movements, and provides the emotional infrastructure of human life in ways that no GDP figure can begin to reflect.

By any purely financial measure, music is a minor industry. By almost every other measure, it is one of the most powerful forces on earth.

Music moves people, and people move money. But more than that, music moves people into emotional realms that people act on. People make decisions based on emotions, not facts. From the moment I set foot in the business many years ago, that was the first thing I learned at the arm of one of the most well-known women in the Silicon Valley PR business.

It's the emotion driven by a story that sells. And music is emotion.

So, what’s my point? That many of the things we post, I post, going to concerts supporting our faves — all of that exists within a very tiny bubble of the grand scale of things. Although I know you know that, I think we often forget about it when we're trying to understand the chaos and contradictions we see.

I've received numerous DM's lately asking WTF is going on? I needed to start with the bigger picture.

I said I was going to post a series of things and this is the beginning — my opinions, like them or not.

Next: Escaping the Bubble