The Music Streaming Economy – Part 2: The Pioneers of Music Streaming

2008 is rightly regarded as a watershed year for the music streaming industry, with Stockholm-based streaming service Spotify launching in October. It was also the year that the fourth generation of mobile telephony (4G LTE) became widely available in many developed countries. This laid the foundations for the music streaming boom: Mobile broadband technology (4G), the smartphone (iPhone 1) that could access the Internet via Wi-Fi, and an ad-funded free streaming service (Spotify) that could be easily used on smartphones from August 2009 on, after Spotify made its offering available for both Android and iOS operating systems.