The world of entertainment industry is yet to recover from Netflix’s global launch announcement last week. For the advocates of online streaming, it was a big news. Then came the report of the Financial Times that said Apple Music has passed 10 million subscribers. At the same time, Spotify, the world’s leader in Music streaming, announced that it had experienced its biggest year, in-terms of subscribers growth, in the second half of 2015.
According to sources, Spotify has around 25 to 30 million paid subscribers whereas around 75 to 100 million people listen to its ad supported free streaming service.
A recent study published by Nielsen on the U.S. music industry showed that music streaming was among the fastest growing sectors of 2015 with a 92.8 percent increase from the previous year’s total, a whopping 317 billion on-demand streams excluding Apple Music.
This is a very likely turn as more and more people are spending more of their time staying connected and hence, finding value in streaming over owning. Over the time, streaming will continue to grow and will become dominant while other segments of music business like CD, downloads, will lose market share as it happened in last year.
Our Take
Although, there are a few very popular music streaming startups in the west like Soundcloud, Spotify, Apple Music, but it is very surprising to see no strong player in the space in any of the Asian markets.
In Bangladesh, we had a music streaming startups launched few years back that died prematurely but afterwards we could not find any other example of a startup doing well in music streaming.
It is tough in Bangladesh and similar economies like India and Pakistan and few other emerging markets to make people pay for listening music but then and again no one tried hard. Every day more and more people in these countries are getting introduced to smart devices and internet and spending more and more hours connected making this space a very potential one to explore.
H/T: Statista
