The Music Industry In The UK Is Changing

Within a year the amount of streamed music on platforms such as Spotify, Google Play or Deezer has doubled. By being in the top 5 Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith, Hozier, Drake, and Rihanna are generating a huge number of plays every day.

The UK is experiencing a revolution in the way the British are listening to music. Nowadays streaming doesn’t mean bad quality anymore and that might be one of the reasons why the record has been broken with 500m songs streamed in only one week, just in the UK market.

Streaming is spreading fast, something which can be illustrated by the worldwide number of paying Spotify subscribers, which have increased from 15m in January to 20m in June 2015. Moreover, Spotify has a total of 75 million active users.

Even if Spotify possess a huge part of the streaming market, the competition is growing. Last month Apple launched a streaming service and today there are some rumours saying that Facebook is also about to break into the streaming industry.

In the UK the total sales of physical format music is decreasing, although vinyl has increased in popularity lately. Nonetheless, physical sales still make up approximately 60% of the UK music market.

However, this tendency allows the industry to hope that the streaming growth tendency will continue to accelerate. Nevertheless, it is not clearly known if this trend will increase the artist’s revenues as the figures don’t differentiate paid subscribers from the users exploiting the service for free.

After having succeeded in convincing users,  the biggest challenge is now to convince musicians and songwriters. Many artists complained about the little money they receive from streaming. Some of them even refused to be present on this kind of platforms. Taylor Swift and AC/DC are known for being resistant about these practices, although both of them lately have started to make their music available on streaming.