When it comes to your consumption of music, do you still prefer buying physical copies of CDs or vinyl, or do you purchase your songs via platforms like iTunes, or do you prefer paying a flat fee and streaming it? While the former two options are still viable, it seems that music streaming is edging closer to becoming the standard in which we consume music.
This is because according to the RIAA’s latest figures (via Pitchfork), paid subscription services in the US in 2016 managed to pull in a whopping $3.9 billion in terms of revenue. To give you guys a bit of context, this actually accounts for a little more than half of the total retail revenue from recorded music in the US in 2016, which was at $7.7 billion.
According to the New York Times, this actually represents an 11.4% increase revenue and it makes it the biggest percentage gain in revenue since 1998, and also represents the highest sales level since 2009. However at the same time, this figure is only about half compared to back in 1999 which was the peak for sales, but we guess it looks like the industry could be slowly “recovering”.
Piracy has no doubt been a huge problem for the industry, but with music streaming services where customers can listen to as much music they want for a flat fee is no doubt appealing, at least compared to paying $10 for one album.
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