It’s no accident that Spotify was launched in Sweden during the culmination of the The Pirate Bay lawsuit in 2008. Spotify was promoted as the legal alternative to P2P files haring and the Swedish music consumers were the perfect test market for such a Freemium music service. Sweden’s neighbouring country Norway was in a similar position: wealthy inhabitants, a high penetration of broadband Internet access and a passion for music. Therefore, the Swedish digital entertainment company Aspiro launched the music streaming provider WiMP (the later Tidal) in cooperation with the Norwegian telecommunication company Telenor and music retailer Platekompaniet in Norway in February 2010. Two months later WiMP also started in Denmark as the first music streaming service for PC, Mac and Android mobile.[1] However, in December 2009, the Danish telco TDC had added an unlimited streaming option to its music download service TDC Play (now YouSee Musik) in cooperation with tech company 24-7 Entertainment.[2] Thus, all three Scandinavian countries were pioneers in establishing a music streaming economy. The fourth Scandinavia country, Finland, lagged behind for some years, but in 2017 the Finnish sound recording market was as streaming-lined as its Scandinavian neighbours.
Figure 1: The global phonographic market in 2017 by digital market shares
Source: After IFPI Global Music Report 2018.
A series of blog entries tells the story of how the Scandinavian countries have become the forerunners of the music streaming economy and highlights the background of this development. In this blog post a comparative analysis of market figures for all Scandinavian countries are presented.
Music Business Research 