Hawaii Music Economics

File Sharing birthed the Digital Music Realm

Hawaii File Sharing changed the music industry forever by shifting money away from the record companies and to the people where people would listen to music and have it on their computer instead of on a physical media like compact disc. Prior to this these old things called Record Stores that had a library of Records, Cassettes, and Compact Discs, with music albums going for $20 in (1999) is worth $37.00 (2025) vs the industry standard of today $13.00 (2025), which was $7 in (1999). Music sharing would continue with Kazaa, Limewire, and this was due to record companies not paying their artists enough and fans wanting prices to go down with the hype of next-level technology that would clear space in their homes by having files instead. Compact Discs for example would go from 13 songs being on there to over a 100 songs and people were writing compact discs like crazy, so there was an obvious need for: respect for people’s home storage, reasonable costs for convenience, and digital format songs.

The Lost Art of Cataloguing Organization

Peer-to-Peer music sharing, it started to get big in 1999 creating Peer-to-Peer music sharing on the internet where people could connect one person who had digital-music and anyone could meet another person through searching a song it was on there with 80 million users. It wasn’t just Hawaii that was file sharing, but everyone who had the app possibly all over the world and the obscure searches would begin with every nook and cranny being listened to instead of the radio, the top 10, and magazine recommendations. This is when all sorts of people were listening to songs from all over the world and people in Hawaii were looking up music from big National Record labels, Local Record Labels, Ethnic Music, Soundtracks, and everything was Free-ninety nine “Free”. 

The GateKeepers are No More

The Rise of Music Streaming, Greedy Mainland Company Numbers from the Record Labels on average would pay 250,000$ (2024. $410,000) because people had to rent a studio, hire additional artists, additional writers, and more. and post File Sharing the support would drop down to 100,000$ (2024. $173,000) to record production (making an album) and have Artists cover the Mixer a 1% royalties, the Producer 3% royalties, the Artist 9%, the Record Label got 87%. By the late 2000’s the grip on artists was breaking because the A&R (artists and repertoire) a music scout would gate keep would lot be able to limit peoples ears on radios, because people would be consuming music primarily from computers. There was so much money in the system of Analog with 84% of music sales were on compact discs. Everything tied to Analog would drop and this dropped in a big way in 2010 to 40% sales of compact discs to 40% digital downloads. In 2015 compact discs were at 20%, digital downloads were at 33%, and streaming was at 33%. And by 2023, compact discs were at 3%, digital downloads 2%, and streaming reigned supreme with 84%.

Streamers are King: Spotify is Chased After

Influencers started out of their garage and made content for people that were the everyday person through relating with them, parasocial relationships with fans, and serving micro-marketing buckets of around 1000 super-fan, 1000 haters, with about 50,000 viewership. The “General Influencer” was born with people getting paid to film themselves every day with trusted-search engines that had no algorithm yet or a limited one. People would trust these people as much as their friends, especially since people had less of them, because enjoying life by being in-person became super-expensive. It wasn’t until the largest of influencers fell and the influencers became celebrities with 2 million-subscribers and calculated-viewership that were as large as actors and then the influencer-bubble exploded as they lost trust in influencers that happened with things like traditional-celebrities, traditional-personalities, and talk-show hosts, which ended the “Influencer Gold Rush”.  

Music Revenue Streams

Catalog Revenue (40%), Gig Revenue (30%), Streams Revenue (10%), Collaboration Revenue (5%), Real Estate Revenue (5%), Digital Revenue (5%), Physical Product Revenue (5%).

Specializing in Positively Monetizing Fans

Selling Out, Selling Yourself, and Promoting Yourself use to be looked down upon to downplay Marketing Strategies and this would be flipped on its face with the the Digital World that people wouldn’t even know who someone else if they had no online presents not only as a person in the business… but also as somebody whos around as people increasing look at their phones and not people around them who they don’t already know in person while they are so called “touching grass”. 

Fan-Only Listening Parties

Wholesome Fan Meet Ups are something that take away exclusivity of being rich or a business connection and that cut line reshapes peoples view of musicians. Taylor Swift made this normalized in the music business when she made events called “The Secret Sessions” are events that take place before releases where fans that are hand picked by the Artist go to their houses or hotels and listen to the album with the artist. 

Types of Streaming Groups