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The Almighty Buck Businesses Music The Internet Apple

Streaming Services Generated More Than 50% of All US Music Industry Revenue in 2016 (variety.com) 34

Janko Roettgers, reporting for Variety: Streaming music services were for the first time ever responsible for more than 50 percent of all U.S. music industry revenue in 2016, according to new numbers released by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) Thursday. Paid and ad-supported streaming together generated 51 percent of music revenue last year, to be precise, bringing in a total of $3.9 billion. In 2015, streaming music was responsible for 34 percent of the music industry's annual revenue. Much of that increase can be attributed to a strong growth of paid subscriptions to services like Spotify and Apple Music. Revenue from paid subscription plans more than doubled in 2016, bringing in $2.5 billion, with an average of 22.6 million U.S. consumers subscribing to streaming services last year. The year before, subscription services had an average of 10.8 million paying subscribers.
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Streaming Services Generated More Than 50% of All US Music Industry Revenue in 2016

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  • by Daemonik ( 171801 ) on Thursday March 30, 2017 @03:47PM (#54146345) Homepage
    Music Industry CEO's claim that it's still not enough money to bathe in, demand more DMCA takedowns and strong arming foreign governments to change their laws, imprison their citizens on industry whims.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      They are loosing ONE BILLION a year with those pesky safe-habour laws after all:
      https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/17/03/30/1331228/safe-harbor-cost-the-us-music-industry-up-to-1b-in-lost-royalties-per-year-study-finds

  • Amazing how if you give people something worth paying for they're more likely to pay for it.

    It's almost like they screwed themselves out of more money by holding out on changing thier business model than piracy ever cost them...

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Yep. If they could get their shit together and offer a single service with all music they could really do well. As it stands now, if you subscribe to one service and it doesn't have what you are looking for, you are not going to subscribe to a second or pay for singles / cd's. You are going to forgo the song, "steal" it, or find it on youtube. If it can't be obtained in one of these ways then the artist loses because he or she has no presence in the new music world.

    • Now imagine what money they could rake in if they only manged to do this world wide instead of just the US market with "carefully selected options" available to the rest of would-be customers that are now pretty much required to find other ways to get their fix.

  • Artist cut (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rijrunner ( 263757 ) on Thursday March 30, 2017 @04:32PM (#54146625)

    Streaming is also one of the lowest percentages of revenue streams to reach the artist... The streaming company and any label take the vast majority of income.

    • by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )

      The streaming company and any label take the vast majority of income.

      And that's different from any of the other revenue streams how?

      • Re:Artist cut (Score:4, Informative)

        by rijrunner ( 263757 ) on Thursday March 30, 2017 @04:49PM (#54146729)

        Average per-stream payout: $0.004891

        http://www.digitalmusicnews.co... [digitalmusicnews.com]

        • Hello, number without context! Are you large or small?

          Without knowing what other forms of listening pay out, we can't tell whether the streaming sources are villains or victims. Note that royalties are not paid to the artist but to the label; the label pays the artist. So just knowing that the artist is receiving less from streaming sources is not enough to tell you that streaming sources are getting a great deal.

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Technically it is both the smallest and largest payout for the artist 'cough' 'cough' drunken drugged up minstrel (lets drop the music marketing bullshit, music geeks is the reality). It depends whether or not the music geek sells via a publisher or sells direct.

      Why the big hate on streaming and direct sales, the publishers are forced to compete with artists content they no longer own. The publishers want nothing but new artist content (new artists in the case being the best at BJs in limos), with by far t

    • Then those artists shouldn't have sold their copyrights to the label. They do not own that music anymore.

    • This is why more and more artists simply bypass the big studios and publish themselves, either really doing it themselves or hiring services that get them online to various streaming portals for pennies compared to studio rates.

      Face it, the "big five" are dinosaurs nobody needs anymore in this time and age. Even if you are a "real" band, i.e. playing instruments instead of creating everything inside a computer, there's plenty of great recording studios that will record your single for a few hundred bucks at

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • That's it? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Thursday March 30, 2017 @04:42PM (#54146679)

    according to new numbers released by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) Thursday. Paid and ad-supported streaming together generated 51 percent of music revenue last year, to be precise, bringing in a total of $3.9 billion.

    So the RIAA's U.S. revenue for all of 2016 is just $3.9 billion / 0.51 = $7.65 billion? That's it? We're mandating DRM, incorporating it into playback media devices and transport layers, forcing ISPs and web services like YouTube to spend untold $millions to go on witch hunts and filter through the 57% of DMCA takedown requests which are fake [slashdot.org], threatening people with loss of their Internet connection, bankruptcy, and jail time. All for less than $25 per capita, and what amounts to roundoff error for Google, Apple, and Microsoft's annual revenue?

    • one sixth of a wall

  • by pubwvj ( 1045960 ) on Thursday March 30, 2017 @04:55PM (#54146783)

    Meanwhile the music industry announces that CD sales have plummeted for the 17th straight year blaming the decreased sales on piracy.

    • I think this is because computers no longer come with CD players. If I can't rip a CD what good is it? Until CD readers make a comeback, CDs are doomed. I suspect the same type of shift is going on with BluRay sales as people stream videos from Netflix and Amazon and watch it NOW, instead of going through a bunch of dopey, unskippable menus, warnings, and previews. If I have a choice between physical media and streaming, I am streaming.

    • Funny that you mention it.

      For the first time in maybe a decade or two, I was trying to buy a CD again. To use in my car, which is pretty much the only place anymore where I have a CD player. So I browsed and checked, and I learned that music CDs containing about 40 minutes of music cost between 15 and 20 bucks today.

      If you are really wondering why people don't buy this, take a wild guess.

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