The Music Streaming Market Revisited, 2011-2015

Last year, I posted an analysis of the international music streaming for 2014 based on IFPI numbers. Since then the global streaming market was highly dynamic and therefore I updated my analysis and included also earlier data. In 2015 the global streaming revenue (subscriptions and ad-supported streaming revenue) increased by 42.5 per cent (IFPI 2016: 17) and had a volume of US $2.89bn. The music streaming market is almost as big as the music download market (US $2.97bn) (IFPI 2016: 49). Music streaming, therefore, accounts for 42 per cent of the global recorded music market. However, the market share of music streaming differs between countries. Whereas in Sweden the music streaming market share is 66.5 per cent of the overall recorded music market, in Germany just 11.4 per cent of the recorded music revenue comes from music streaming sources. And Japan, the second largest recorded music market in world, lags behind with meagre 4.6 per cent. In the following, please read an analysis of the international music streaming for the time-span from 2011-2015.

Animation of the international music streaming markets, 2011-2015

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Book Review: “Download!” by Phil Hardy

“Download! How the Internet Transformed the Record Business” by music industry journalist Phil Hardy is a detailed analysis how the majors record companies lost control of the value added chain in the music industry in the digital revolution. He tells the story about self-confident and maybe arrogant music business executives, who had profited from the CD revolution in the 1990s, but were outmanoeuvred by industry outsiders who set up a totally new added value network for recorded music. The once highly profitable record business that attracted investors from other industries in the 1980s and 1990s turned into a laboratory of digitalization with declining record sales, job losses and divestments of pressing plants and distribution networks in the 2000s. “Download!” is, therefore, an important contribution to understand the impact of Internet and new media on the transformation of the recorded music industry.

How Bad Is Music File Sharing? – Part 13

Rob/Waldfogel’s article in the Journal of Law and Economics is based on a 2004 working paper entitled “Piracy on the High C’s. Music Downloading, Sales Displacement, and Social Welfare in a Sample of College Students”.  The authors used a survey-based dataset of music downloading and purchases of 8,200 albums by 412 college students. The repondents were asked whether they download more and buy fewer albums. The authors document “(…) that downloading reduces music purchases, by roughly one fifth of a sale for each recent download and possibly much more” (Rob and Waldfogel 2004: 29). The conservative estimates indicate that “(…) downloading reduced purchases by individuals in the sample by about 10 percent during 2003”. (Rob and Waldfogel 2004: 29)

How Bad Is Music File Sharing? – Part 9

In April 2006, Alejandro Zentner published in the Journal of Law and Economics an article entitled “Measuring the Effect of File Sharing on Music Purchases”, which was based on his dissertation of the same titel, published the year before. Originally Zentner presented the results in a 2003 working paper, and a 2005 article in Topics in Economic Analysis and Policy was also be based on these findings. The results of the study suggest that “(…) peer-to-peer usage reduces the probability of buying music by 30%.” This means that “(…) sales in 2002 would have been around 7.8 percent higher.” (Zentner 2006: 63).

GAO report on the economic impact of “piracy”

In April 2010 the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report to the Committee of Judiciary of the U.S. Senate as well as House of Representatives entitled “Intellectual Property. Observations on Efforts to Quantify the Economic Effects of Counterfeit and Pirated Goods“. Although the report is foced on counterfeiting it also deals with the infringement of intellectual property right (aka “digital piracy”). In the following you can read more about the key findings of the report.