Gaming Makes More Money Than Music

People radically undersell the impact that gaming has had on entertainment habits. Once upon a time a good Friday night may have had you sitting there listening to some record you just purchased. I’m sure many people still listen to music as a way to pass the time. I doubt it’s often a record they just purchased, shoutout to my beatmaker homies who still do that. 

I can assure that back in the 70’s, there was not a single video game on Earth that could hold a candle to today. These days I find a lot of older people bamboozled that younger folks don’t want to sit there and appreciate an album, listening to the same project 37 times finding all the secret nuances. 

There are many projects in my teenage years that I listened to on repeat. I have lived through that experience, but I am also the first generation blessed with next level games.

Video games make a lot of fucking money

Check this market report article on entertainment as a whole, it says gaming made 227 billion US dollars in 2023. Meanwhile Billboard says music made 26.2 billion US dollars . You know why? Because video games are pretty damned engaging pieces of media.

I have clocked something like 300 hours playing Cyberpunk 2077 over the last 2 years. I even managed to push my personal brand by playing it live over the internet. When you think back on the “golden era”s for music, a lot of the time they are pre Grand Theft Auto. There was no Skyrim or Call of Duty yet. There were some arguably corny video games out there, akin to what the present VR market offers. 

Sure those games are fun, and if you were a nerd like me you loved them to death, but a lot of activities in life beat Super Nintendo games. Imagine now growing up in a world where you had a PS5 in the crib. I think many who did would have spent less time with music, and created a new social lubricant for the squad. 

The movie industry is still outperforming the gaming industry as it seems to have made 283.5 billion in 2023. However a movie is like a 2 hour time commitment, bing bang boom and then you are done. It comes with a theatre and is a fully engrossing experience. However I don’t think anyone expected gaming to be 80% of the value of the movie industry. 

I think a lot of people sat with albums and bumped them on repeat because it’s an amazing escape. I still love music. A great album is a truly wonderful thing and the live experience of a concert is next level. We just have so many other entertainment options at our disposal that never existed before. 

Music is a high effort thing to be a fan of

To be a fan of music, you probably have to be proactive. You need to stay on top of what comes out, dedicate time to listen to all of the projects. If you are really about it, you know that one listen is actually not enough, so you need to listen to them more than once.

Then you need to find time to replay the classics you love. I say find time, because past the age of 25, I find life gives you far less opportunity to sit there and just listen to music. To really focus on the music you can’t really be multi-tasking. I find public transit one of the only times I can get lost in music distraction free (shame I use that to write my own music). 

Maybe some of this is anecdotal. I still think this is why singles are dominating and albums aren’t received with the same tenacity. We have so many things to do in our life, we aren’t as willing to carve out an hour to sit there and just listen to music. Maybe there is something to be said for stopping and disconnecting, personally I choose to read when I do that.

The thing is, cutting out the club and other live music environments, when you are at home, many of us are choosing video games or movies over music. I’m sure there is someone who is already rah rahing about how change is bad and people don't appreciate music like they used to. I think that is true, but also that the novelty of music has evolved.

Everyone can just understand music these days

Hi, my name is Holden and I’m an alternative rapper from Montreal. I, alongside millions of other people, make music. We all now have the tools to do it at home. There is knowledge and wisdom shared in abundance. Literally any talentless schmuck can become a musician and drop an album.

I love this. I’m all for the democratization of art. There is this wonderful culture built around explaining every technical nuance in every classic song. I mean YouTube will explain the entire mystery and magic of music to such a level, that for me at least, it becomes more science than art. People study the past, then practise their craft, A/B testing their way to more success.

The thing is, everyone is watching dudes like Rick Beato break down the secets of the music industry. 12Tone will deconstruct entire songs, explaining in detail why the creative choices were made. Another way to look at it is we have pretty much explained the joke and it has lost a lot of its humour.

Early on in MMORPGs there was a sense of wonder of trying things. Of collective thinking before the internet. Now there are guides to every quest, you never have to ask a friend and MMOs are less impactful on our culture because of it. 

There is a charm to being a fan of something you don’t quite get, whether it’s the secret sauce or the hidden meaning. It lets you get lost in the art faster. There used to be a wonder to it all. It felt unattainable, like you can never be that amazing with it.

I posit that access to information has made the magic of music less present. The vast amount of music that gets released daily is so staggering that people aren’t as drawn to it. There isn’t this social mystique of bonding, like we used to have with CD collections.

Algorithms make music antisocial

Before the algorithm had us all niching out into our own little playlists, we used to literally trade CDs and stuff. People used to put people onto music and entire social dynamics were built around a culture of music discovery. Now there is a daily “For You” mix. 

We are flooded with so much music, so easily, that we are bound to like, it becomes exhausting to think about. I will never hear all the music in my city’s local scene. There isn’t enough time in my life left. There are hundreds of songs coming out each day.

The gatekeeping of the past made it that only the big names got to drop music. This limited the market and made it easier to bond over the chosen few. In a sense, AAA gaming is still like that. With music, there are so many lanes, and communities and people, it’s exhausting to keep up with and that makes the likelihood of your immediate peers liking what you like much smaller. 

Maybe the volume of music dropped means that there isn’t as much quality as back in the day. I am not convinced that is the case. It’s more like the increase in quality of video games mixed with the saturation of musical mediocrity in the mainstream has left many people to trust robots to feed them music while they go connect over other entertainment.

Also drink prices are stupid expensive so the club/bar is less popping than ever. We’ll never have the past again. Welcome to a gamer filled future. 

Live Long and Prosper Everyone