Spotify and Apple’s streaming offerings have boosted the music business to its best year decades

Source: business.financialpost.com --- Thursday, March 30, 2017
The growing popularity of Spotify and Apple Music is nursing the music industry back to health after years of declining sales. In 2016, U.S. music sales grew 11 per cent to US$7.7 billion, the Recording Industry Association of America said Thursday. That’s the biggest jump since 1998, when the industry sold almost six times as many CDs. Streaming, a category that includes Spotify, Pandora and YouTube, accounted for 51 per cent, the first time it has contributed the majority of revenue. Sales for the industry, led today by Sony Music Entertainment, Vivendi SA’s Universal Music and Warner Music Group, are still just half of what they were in 1999. But after years of blaming the internet for its struggles and fighting technology conglomerates in the court and in public, the music industry is now embracing the web. The industry is “leading the digital transition,” said Cary Sherman, the RIAA’s chief executive officer. Related Step aside algorithms, meet the tastemakers who curate the major streaming music services Apple Inc puts human curation at centre of major Apple Music overhaul “A year of growth in the U.S. music business is welcome news,” Sherman wrote in a post on the website Medium. “It suggests that years of patiently nurturing a nascent streaming marketplace has begun to pay off. But it does not erase 15 years of declines, or continuing uncertainty about the future.” Paid services from Spotify and others contributed the vas ...

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