Over the years, downloading of songs has been responsible for generating tons of revenue for the music industry internationally. However, in recent times music streaming has taken over. YouTube and Spotify are the “Big Dogs” in the streaming music business. The music industry in the U.S witnessed a massive growth sales in 2015 for the first time since 2011, by reeling in a whooping income of 7 billion dollars in 2017 and 8.4 billion in 2016
Research reveals that music listeners are paying to stream music rather than download it now. Having paid 3 billion dollars each for the rights to stream music and also having almost 30 million paying subscribers around the world, Spotify is indubitably the Music streaming giant of our time.
Music subscribers in the US and UK streamed an average of 3444 streams each in 2015, averaging 66 streams a week.
While old school artistes like The Beatles have made their material available on these websites for streaming,15 time Grammy winner, Adele revealed that she doesn’t like streaming music and that her it was her decision whether to make her newest album, 25 available on Spotify. Taylor Swift too is another multiple award winning superstar that has kept her music off Spotify. In 2014, she took down all her songs from Spotify and refused to make her catalogue available on the service because of concerns over her royalties. However, in 2017, Spotify boss managed to convince Taylor Swift to return to the streaming service.
