Since it seems like I'm always the bearer of bad news, here's something that I hope will be a bit more upbeat. A new study by IE Market Research called the "Global Digital Music Forecast" predicts that music retail revenues will increase to $32.5 billion by the end of 2014.Now considering that the global total music sales fell by by 7 percent last year to $17 billion, these seems a tad optimistic to me, but I don't write reports for Goldman Sachs either.
How did they come up with these numbers? It seems that there are now 832 million paid users of digital music worldwide, and the study says that number is expected to almost double to 1.555 billion in 2014. As a result, digital music revenues will increse from a current $4.82 billion to $21.3 billion at the end of 2014.
Where are these users coming from? Can it be that Chinese music lovers will suddenly honor international copyright law? Will all the P2P users suddenly get religion and buy a subscription instead?
It seems that subscription will lead the way on both online and mobile music channels according to the studio, although the number of music users downloading their music will also increase from 507 million in 2009 to over 1 billion in 2013.
Some other numbers from the study:
- There are now 105.4 million paid users of digital music in North America and that number is expected to grow to 227.2 million in 2014.
- Online music download users in North America will increase dramatically from 50.4 million in 2009 to 135.0 million in 2014.
- Digital music retail revenues in North America are expected to reach $11.86 billion in 2014.
You can read more about the the study here.
----------------------------------
Follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.
Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating the music business.
No comments:
Post a Comment