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Warner Music Group recently revealed its financial figures for the last quarter, and surprise, surprise, streaming music services are a growing source of income. And they’re only going to become a bigger piece of the pie from here on in.
The music industry was the first of the major content producers to be hit by the emergence of the Internet as a source for shared and sharing media files. It didn’t know how to react to this sudden threat to its business, and flopped around trying to make examples of certain websites and certain individuals in the hopes of scaring off everyone else. That didn’t work out so well.
It has now become clear that the music industry should have plowed all its time and effort into increasing the range of legal options open to consumers. If they had done so earlier then things would be much rosier for all concerned right now. It took the industry a long time to embrace these other options, especially streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora, but it finally gave in and accepted the inevitable.
Now, as the figures clearly show, the music industry is getting rewarded for its gamble, with Warner Music Group claiming 25 percent of its digital revenues from streaming services. This works out to around $54 million, roughly 8 percent of Warners’ total revenues for the period. This does include YouTube, but even so the numbers being touted are impressive.
The bottom line is that the way people consume music is changing. Less of us are buying CDs in stores, but a growing number of us are choosing to either purchase whole albums or individual tracks in digital formats, or listening to music legally on demand through subscription-based offerings such as Spotify or Rdio.
And then there is file-sharing, which will always exist no matter how much money and energy is wasted trying to curtail it. Give consumers fair legal options and they will likely take them. Those that don’t aren’t worth worrying about.
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