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Music Streaming Possibly Replacing Downloads in the Future

By Janelle Li - on 4 Jul 2014, 3:38pm

Music Streaming Possibly Replacing Downloads in the Future

According to Nielsen's US music report, on-demand streaming is rapidly increasing, with a significant jump of 42% when comparing the first half of 2014 with the first half of 2013. The total number of streams from January to June this year came up to 70 billion, an increase of more than 20 billion.

On the other hand, number of digital tracks sold fell 13% to 593.6 million, while number of digital albums sold decreased 11.6% to 53.8 million. 

One medium made a comeback though. Vinyl collections picked up pace in the last few years as a niche favourite, with sales of vinyl records up by 40% in the first half of this year compared to the same half in 2013 - an increase of more than 1 million records.

The above figures reflect the usage in the United States, where streaming services are abundant, be it music or video. This trend also backs the recent acquisitions that tech giants have made, notably Apple's procurement of Beats, and Google snapping up Songza.

Spotify is probably the first name most people recall when the topic of music streaming services is brought up.

Singapore is also seeing more streaming services entering the market, with the most prominent being Spotify (check out our tips for using Spotify here). YouTube is also a popular platform for consumers to stream music videos, but dedicated audio streaming services have been growing faster than video, according to the same Nielsen report. If it continues growing at the same rate, these on-demand audio streaming services is set to overtake music video streaming in the US as early as end of the year, and eventually the same trend is likely to follow internationally.

Source: TechCrunch

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