The Wall Street Journal has said that music sales on the iTunes store have gone down 13 to 14 percent since the start of the year, worldwide. It’s no real surprise to anyone in the music industry, with streaming becoming so popular. A report by Mark Mulligan of Midia Research put out a report in August stating that 30 percent of consumers now stream music, 23 percent of those people used to buy at least one album a month but don’t anymore, and that 45 percent of all people who download music also stream music.
Spotify and other streaming companies are expanding on a huge scale: Spotify went from 24 million active users in March 2013 to 40 million by May 2014, and is sitting at 50 million now. In the UK, there were 10.2 billion streamed songs from January to September 2014, which is almost double from the same period in 2013. Three hundred million tracks are now streamed weekly. In other words, iTunes music sales are taking the hit, and so are music apps like Shazam. This could mean that Beats Music might actually stick around, if it can keep some revenue coming in for Apple. If the company can convert even 10 percent of its iPhone customers in 2015 to a reduced-fee monthly music subscription, that could be tens of millions of new subscribers.
