The music industry has continuously been evolving for quite some time now. In particular, not everyone has accustomed to the idea of streaming music. There are still a number of artists who have refuse to join the bandwagon of music streaming but opt for releasing their music through albums.
A recent update from the Recording Industry Association of America, however, shows that music streaming has been helping to revive the struggling music industry.
As a whole, the music subscription industry looks like it will be amassing $2 billion once the year is over. This is, of course, because of services such as Apple Music and Spotify. As a matter of fact, the first half of the year earned for almost half of this number from all recorded music revenues by way of streaming.
And according to RIAA CEO Cary Sherman, this is a significant change for the music industry; especially since it was primarily focused on physical products not too long ago.
As for the specifics, an average of over 18 million music subscriptions in just the first two quarters of the year. This number has doubled over last year’s reported figure, which was also gathered roughly at the same time.
To this, Sherman notes that music subscriptions bring in a significantly higher revenue compared to CD sales. In the first half of the year, streaming revenue expanded 57 percent and reached $1.6 billion. This accounted for almost half of all industry sales.
According to Bloomberg, the people who were subscribing to Apple Music are those who are new to using a streaming service. They are not the perceived former Spotify users. On the recent count, Spotify is said to have around 40 million paid users whereas Apple Music only has 17 million.
It is important to note though that Apple is not the sole option when it comes to digital music. Spotify has a larger paid subscription service compared to Apple Music. They have not been showing any indication of slowing down even though Apple Music has joined in on this field.
On his mid-year update addressing the association’s relationship with YouTube, Sherman shares that streaming is not all good news. As a matter of fact, record industry executives continue to criticize YouTube’s attitude of paying artists.
On a blog post, Sherman states: “Does it make any sense that approximately 1000 plays of a song on one streaming service yields dramatically different payouts than a song on a different service that gets to hide behind the failing 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)?”
According to Sherman, while it doesn’t pose any difference for the ordinary fan, streaming a song on YouTube has a dramatic difference for both the artist and his label company.
In the same sense, Spotify’s free streaming tier has a “jarring and indefensible” payout difference between free music streaming and paid service.
As expected, physical media sales have not been doing any good to helping reshape the music industry. In fact, sales from this medium have significantly dropped 14 percent in the first half of the year compared to its sales last year. In the past, paid downloads were also earning double-digit figures.
Because of these changes, Apple has continued to push Apple Music. For iOS 10, Apple has given its Music app a design makeover to keep up with the changes.
