News

10 years ago this week, the Supreme Court made a historic ruling which decided that companies which actively help users steal music via their sites could be held responsible for copyright theft.

Apple’s entrance into the subscription streaming market made a predictable splash.

A few notes on our recently-released revenue and shipment data on the U.S. music business.

Today we released our report on recorded music revenues and shipment information for 2014.

Nielsen and Billboard recently released topline sales data on the U.S. music industry for 2013. Unlike previous years, there is a strong – and we think well deserved – emphasis on streaming music listening. Still, we believe there is more to the story, as the streaming component provides important context for a number of reasons.

Like others interested in copyright policy issues, we noticed the new academic paper by professors at the London School of Economics. The biases and policy wish lists of the authors are abundantly clear, which we have no objection to, so long as they are properly noted. Much of the paper retreads familiar – and widely debunked – criticisms of copyright enforcement. Others have leveled various criticisms of the paper (see here, here, here and here for examples). 

The announcement earlier this week of a new music streaming service by Apple has yet again drawn attention to the rapidly emerging digital music space. Based on the announced description, iTunes Radio sounds like a great new entrant. And it joins a long list of services that give fans almost any type of listening experience they are looking for, and often for free.

Apple’s announcement of the launch of its iTunes Radio service is understandably generating a lot of attention on the expanding number of streaming services and what it might mean and say about the online music marketplace. Here are some initial thoughts from my perspective.

There’s been an interesting confluence of news in the last week, all interrelated and all complementary: We reported our 2012 year-end sales and shipment numbers, including the increasing importance of streaming music – so-called “access models” which now total $1 billion in revenues New data from NPD finding…