(5) Music streaming just became a billion-dollar industry

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/digital-media/11881158/Music-streaming-just-became-a-billion-dollar-industry.html

Summarise:

Revenues from streaming music online have surpassed $1bn for the first time. Digital downloads of songs continued to fall out of favour in the first half of the year, while free and paid music-streaming revenue kept growing, even without much of a bump from the launch of Apple Music.Streaming revenue as a whole surpassed $1bn in the first half of the year for the first time. While streaming music revenues continued to grow healthily, the rates being paid to labels and artists for streaming music do not always equal fair market rates. But the level is far below the industry peak in 1999 of $14.6bn, when compact discs were dominant.

Key data/statistical information:

• Overall music industry revenue fell a half percentage point to $3.2bn
• Revenue from paid subscriptions to services like Spotify and Rhapsody grew 25pc to $478m, while revenue from free services like Pandora grew 22pc to $550m
• Download sales revenue fell 4pc to $1.3bn, while physical disc sales dropped 17pc to $748m
• The rise of digital streaming has helped the industry maintain annual revenues of around $7bn since 2010, offsetting the decline in revenue from digital downloads of single tracks that began in 2013

What's my view?

I think that streaming music is a good idea as its another way in which the public can listen to music. In fact it has helped the music industry as they were loosing money before from people listening to music for free. However, it has been said that the money that the artists receive is below the amount they would get in the late 90's from CD's.