How making money with music is finally changing

It's really not a very good graph (click to enlarge).

But, what it's saying is this...

We’ve all heard that the music business is changing, and here, from The Times Online, is a chart to prove it. The red line at the top is the revenue from sales of recorded music. The light green line below that is the revenue from live music. The dark green line below that, “PRS revenue,” is the revenue from royalties.

Basically there’s more and more money being spent on live shows and, consequently, more money going to artists themselves. At the same time the labels are being squeezed out of the equation because sales of recorded music are falling.

The Times adds:

It’s interesting too that, overall, industry revenues have grown in the period—though admittedly not by much—which arguably adds strength to the notion that, when the BPI releases its annual report claiming how much ‘the music industry’ has suffered from the growth in illegal file-sharing, what it perhaps should be saying is how much the record labels have suffered. For other people in the industry, not least artists, the future arguably holds more promise.

(via Good)