|Policy
It’s been less than a year since SiriusXM completed its $3.5 billion acquisition of streaming music service Pandora, but the two companies have already leveraged their collective assets to boost each other’s services.
More than three fourths of the American internet-using population over the age of 13 is now streaming music. That’s according to MusicWatch’s audiocensus Q2 2019 report on U.S. music consumption and listening habits, shared exclusively with Billboard in advance of its publication.
SiriusXM today announced its first step in a major commitment to delivering world-class content to the Pandora audience. SiriusXM is creating a dedicated Content Team focused on applying SiriusXM’s critically-acclaimed and proven model of curation and exclusive programming to the Pandora platform.
Revenue from music-streaming platforms now accounts for three-quarters of the music industry’s top line, as subscriptions to services including Spotify Technology SA, Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and others in the U.S. grew 42% in 2018 to top 50 million for the first time.
Fueled by tremendous creative output by groundbreaking artists and now more than 50 million paid subscriptions, the U.S. music industry experienced its third year of consecutive growth in 2018 with retail revenues up 12% to $9.8 billion. Streaming now comprises 75% of total industry revenues. Vinyl continues to be a bright spot for the physical market, up 8% to $419 million, the highest revenue level since 1988.
Amid an array of choice when it comes to platforms and devices for media consumption, one thing remains constant: Americans’ unwavering love for music. According to Nielsen, the music industry experienced significant overall growth in 2018, with total album equivalent audio consumption up 23% over 2017, driven by a 49% increase in on-demand audio song streams compared to last year.
According to Nielsen’s just-published data, the music industry experienced significant overall growth in 2018. Total album equivalent audio consumption grew 23% over 2017. This was driven by a 49% increase in on-demand audio song streams last year.
The holiday season can make you feel all kinds of emotions—happy, excited, an impending sense of doom. Who’s to say? But no matter what you feel this holiday season, Pandora wants to remind you that things are always just a little bit better with music.
Music streaming continues its ascendance, with the number of paid streaming subscriptions on track to reach 235 million worldwide by the end of 2018, according to a new music market report from Futuresource Consulting.
For the first time in nearly three years, music licensing has become a hot topic in Washington, D.C. Last time I wrote extensively on the subject was in “Transparency in Music Licensing and the Statutory Remedy Problem,” a paper responding to the controversy surrounding two District Court consent decrees involving Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), two major performance-rights organizations (PROs)