Streaming music now outsells CDs

[john]

Streaming music drowns out CD sales in US for the first time
US revenue from streaming services like Pandora, Spotify and Apple's Beats eclipsed sales of CDs last year, according to data from the music industry's trade group.

...According to data on music sales from the Recording Industry Association of America, sales in the US from streaming music were $1.87 billion in 2014, the RIAA said, while CD sales were $1.85 billion. Streaming revenue -- which includes subscription services like Spotify and Apple's Beats Music, radio like Pandora and Sirius XM, and ad-supported operations like Vevo, YouTube and free versions of Spotify -- jumped 29 percent last year, while CD revenue dropped 12.7 percent.

Meanwhile, digital downloads, the music purchases that typify Apple's iTunes store, still represented the biggest slice of the recording industry's revenue. Their sales fell 8.7 percent to $2.58 billion

The data illustrates an increasing shift from purchasing music to own in the form of a downloaded track, CD, record or cassette tape to a world in which music is increasingly paid for with subscriptions for all-you-can-eat access or with advertising. This underlying change in the music industry has led to outcries from some camps and praise from others....

http://www.cnet.com/news/streaming-music...irst-time/

Links to 2014 article

Attention, artists: Streaming music is the inescapable future. Embrace it
Music's bedrock business will be selling access to streams, not ownership of tunes. So what does that mean for the artists you love? It should be music to their ears....

..."It started off you would tour to support an album," Pollock said of legacy bands like his client Depeche Mode. "That's now shifted to putting out an album to create a reason to justify a tour."

Live performance revenue is the biggest moneymaker in the business, and it's getting bigger. Live music sales are expected to grow to 64 percent of the US music industry by 2018, from 59 percent share last year, according to PwC's entertainment and media outlook.

Another perk of streaming: it can tell artists where they'll probably pack venues. After Pandora showed Hutchinson the top 10 cities that listen to him most, he was surprised to see the list include places like Seattle, where he gets less radio play. He made sure to put it on his tour. High-priced VIP tickets sold out weeks in advance.

Streaming music platforms are also allowing artists to widen their "merch table" to include intangible experiences such as selling a one-on-one Skype chat with a fan. Smule, the music-app maker behind Sing Karaoke, has begun a program of promotional partnerships with artists. Emerging artist Todd Carey, for example, offered a contest to Smule-app users: upload a cover of his single for the chance to win an iPad. Because people ended up buying his music to practice, the business effect was immediate and obvious, said manager Jason Spiewak. Carey went from selling 100 or so singles a week to a thousand-plus, and his views on YouTube and social following jumped. ...

http://www.cnet.com/news/attention-artis...mbrace-it/