Matti Robinson
14 Sep 2016 17:18
Music industry, like many others, are slow to adapt and because of that slow adaption they've had to come up with all kinds of reasons to why sales of antiquated media is slowing down. Now they've come up with a new, and in a way old, problem.
Obviously technologies like streaming have allowed music business to flourish in a completely unprecedented way but this is not the way the industry giants, record companies, and industry lobbyists want it to be. As music is closer to the consumer often the middle man can be left with not much to brag about.
The new problem according to the industry is with streaming services, or services that abuse streaming services. With CDs the problem was ripping, and now with streams like YouTube the problem is again ripping.
According to WSJ the recording industry is blaming third party software that allows consumers to download (rip) the audio out of YouTube streams and store it locally. This problem has "serious impact" on subscription numbers, says the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) report. This, even though the global sales of music increased significantly first time in decades. The 3.2% growth comes overwhelmingly from streaming which increased 45%.
IFPI says that according to a survey stream ripping has increased and in some demographics (16-24) almost half have downloaded music from streaming services using these means. YouTube commented that historically only 20 percent of people are willing to pay for music, which explains the popularity of services like YouTube and Spotify with their advertisement models.
The global revenue of the recording industry has declined from the over $25 billion in the early 2000s to today's $15 billion but the trend seems to be over thanks to increasing sales in streaming.