Services like Spotify already have more customers than the digital purchase of music

Slow but safe. This motto of the fable The Hare and the Turtle describe quite accurately the situation of the music industry from a few years to this part. Specifically, the strength they have charged services like Spotify versus other options to consume music on the Internet.

Although formats such as the vinyl record have returned very strongly and have recovered part of the sales of the music industry, services like Spotify, Tidal or Apple Music offer huge catalogs at very, very affordable prices. As reported in Quartz , streaming services have surpassed the sale of digital music for the first time in its history.

As you can see, the percentage of users listening to streaming music has grown worldwide, which indicates that MP3 music collections may be preparing to spend a better life in a few few years.

The music industry does not notice

It is true that with hundreds of billions of reproductions of the most popular songs money is generated, money that goes to platforms, artists and record companies. We could assume that the music industry is recovering thanks to this increase in the consumption of music in streaming, but it is not.

We are in 2017, not in 1999, when the CD was at its peak of popularity. At that time the value of the music industry was 28.9 billion dollars, while now its value is 15000 million as shown in the following chart:

Revenues from the music industry grow slowly every year after nearly twenty years of steady decline. Physical disks have been replaced by cheaper, Internet- centric methods of consumption. With streaming services the benefits they get are not, by far, the ones they got years ago. One can not speak of a total recovery of the industry.

If services like Spotify continue to gain popularity they can stabilize the industry again, but there is still a long way to go until you see your best days.