There’s no word yet on how Pandora’s new paid tier will affect upcoming results, but we’ll make sure to keep you updated on the news once we have it. Pandora has also confirmed that they’re working on their $9.99 tier to better compete with Apple Music and Spotify Premium.
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Even the recently resurgent market for vinyl LPs was down, with revenue at $207.1 million, down from $221 million in the first half of 2015. Almost one-third (30 percent) of the time consumers spent streaming music occurred on Pandora, followed by YouTube at 27 percent and Spotify at 18 percent, according to MusicWatch, a company providing consumer research for the music industry.
RIAA’s data showed that streaming revenue in the US grew 57 percent in the first half of 2016, reaching $1.6 billion, and accounted for nearly half of industry sales, while subscriptions totaled $1.01 billion. “Although Spotify Premium has a lead over Apple Music it is important to keep in mind that Spotify had quite a head start, and many Apple users are still in the trial phase”.
Vinyl shipments had soared by more than 28 percent in all of past year. Ad sales on free on-demand streamers grew 24 % to $195 million in the last 6 months.
“Many services rake in billions of dollars for themselves on the backs of music’s popularity but pay only relative pennies for artists and labels”.
“The revenue growth from subscriptions alone more than offset the declines from physical sales and permanent digital downloads”, the trade group said. That totals $1.012 billion, which is down 17.1 percent from the prior year total of $1.23 billion, when 56.4 million copies of albums generated $564.7 million and 554.5 million track downloads garnered $665.2 million. That means that as album download sales fell, the labels have been raising list prices, with the average list price coming in at $10.38 for a download album versus an average list price of $10.01 in the first half of past year. CD album sales fell to 38.9 million units, accounting for $443.9 million ($11.41 average list price), down 43.8 million and $531 million.
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Vinyl, the darling of indie retailers and indie labels, might finally be peaking.
