Roger Fingas
Revenue from music streaming is now overshadowing CD sales in the US, according to new data published by the Recording Industry Association of America on Thursday, signalling a sea-change in favor of services like Spotify, Pandora, and Beats Music.
Music streaming revenues from 2014 totalled $1.87 billion, up 29 percent year-over-year, while CD sales fell 12.7 percent to $1.85 billion, the RIAA said in a report shared with CNet. The streaming category includes not just standard Internet radio but also Sirius XM, and music video sources such as Vevo and YouTube.
Downloads held the lion's share of revenue at $2.58 billion. That however is a decline of 8.7 percent from 2013, and indeed overall US music revenue dipped 0.5 percent to $6.97 billion.
Streaming revenues accounted for 27 percent of the market last year, up from 21 percent. Downloads shrank from 40 to 37 percent, and physical products — including not just CDs, but vinyl and cassettes — claimed 32 percent in 2014.
Within the streaming milieu, free but ad-supported on-demand services saw their revenue surge 34 percent to $295 million. This was nevertheless dwarfed by paid subscriptions, which rose 25 percent to $799 million.
The shift towards streaming has posed a serious issue for Apple, which dominates the downloads market by way of the iTunes Store. Its current streaming service, iTunes Radio, has failed to gain much traction, but the company is believed to be working on a rebranding of Beats Music to provide an on-demand iTunes choice.
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19 Comments
I don't see streaming as a good thing at all in its present incarnation. Also, I think it's wrong to lump in Internet radio with streaming; it's quite a different thing. Frankly, here in England, most people only ever listen to music via free radio or the usual suspects: YouTube/Vevo. Teenagers are the ones who tend to gorge on music, as they have the most free time and lap it up. Then life intervenes. Ultimately, I think people still want to own music, and that is the only way that musicians will be able to earn any decent money off recordings. The streaming paradigm is just too like radio and doesn't have enough value. Whilst I would love a streaming service from Apple, it would only be to supplement iTunes and CDs, and I would only be prepared to pay a small amount (say, $5 a month) if it included some kind of discount for purchases. I will never pay a penny for pure streaming.
I'm not surprised. $10 a month about an album a month purchased but grants access to a much wider catalog. I'd like to see Apple find a way to straddle the bridge between those that occasionally like to own the music versus rent.
This is terrible. With Jimmy Iovine in board I'm sure a solution is coming. I have teens in my life and about %90 of their music streaming is from unofficial YouTube channels. YouTube stands back and hardly does anything about these uploads. It's as if they do it on purpose to take money from Apple. Giggle would rather not make a penny off these listeners than to have them potentially pay the artists and Apple.
love Spotify, and other than maybe an internet apocalypse, there in no better way to access and listen to music..as a consumer. My bomb shelter has physical copies in both hand crank and braille.
For musicians I think it can work for them too, they have gone through many format changes and survived. They will make it through. This is far better than piracy, which this significantly minimizes. The music is streaming through the internet, paid for or not.
I've been ahead of the handheld streaming trend for years, using my transistor radio to listen. :lol: