Stream Back to Consciousness
“The industry still isn’t back to where it was at its 1999-ish peak, when Britney Spears was a giant star and people bought CDs for $15, even if they only wanted to hear a single song. But it is getting much closer than optimists might have imagined only a few years ago.” Recode: The music business had its second year in a row of big-time growth, thanks to streaming.
+ Everyone is getting on the streaming bandwagon. “Digital download sales have fallen so much in the past few years that they’re now smaller than sales of CDs, vinyl, and other physical media.”
+ There’s one thing that managed to stick around from the heyday of the music download era: You still like to steal music. From Variety: Spotify reveals 2 million people used hacked apps to suppress ads.