Taylor Swift is a selling machine and embodies the All-American pop-star, but it must be mentioned that the country singer isn’t involved with the music industry’s current playback phenomenon — streaming. T. Swizzle recently removed her entire music catalog from Spotify, despite 40% of the audio streaming platform’s 40 million users having her songs on their playlists. Streaming is showing no signs of going anywhere anytime soon, as Billboard has finally come to grips with acknowledging playback stats towards album charting. In addition, Spotify teamed up with Uber, so streaming can literally go with you everywhere. Apple has also announced plans to automatically install the Beats Music App on all of their devices in the near future, which pushes forward the practice of streaming versus purchasing physical CDs.
40. Million. Users. Most of which fit the younger demographic, the same target audience that used to buy music. For the first time since 2001, digital sales have declined annually. Are sites like Spotify and Soundcloud the problem? Record labels like Warner Music seem to believe so, as the publishing company legally blitzed Soundcloud so hard the company was forced to sign on to be on the short end of the stick financially.
[ad2]
