Soon after I published this post about Spotify, I read articles here (h/t @digitalmusicorg) and here (h/t @gleonhard) that got further into the data on the streaming service.
Two key takeaways:
From Techdirt, a piece about the marketplace in Sweden, where the service first launched:
A new report looks at the Swedish recorded music market, and found that it's up an astounding 30.1% in the first half of this year, due almost entirely to Spotify. Digital music now accounts for 63.5% of all music sales, and streaming services (mainly Spotify) represent 89% of all digital music sales. MusicAlly notes that streaming may be cannibalizing downloads, but the massive growth in streaming is more than outweighing the decrease in downloads.
While that is great news for Spotify specifically and streaming services more generally, my piece was about the US over the past year. According to Billboard.biz:
. . .one number is all that really matters here: 13 billion. That's the number of songs streamed by U.S. users since Spotify's July 14 launch in the U.S. Yes, it's a big number, and it covers both free listeners and paying subscribers.
The bottom line is that these numbers show promising growth, especially for a service in its infancy. What's remarkable is how Spotify in 2012 looks like the iTunes Music Store in 2004.