Streaming has become for the first time the top money-maker for the US recorded music business, but it has struggled to offset falling CD sales and downloads, industry data showed on Tuesday.
Releasing its figures for last year, the Recording Industry Association of America said that streaming grossed more than US$2 billion, led by rising subscriptions for services such as Spotify Ltd.
Amid the emergence last year of new players such as Apple Music and Tidal, revenue from paid subscriptions to streaming services — which offer unlimited, on-demand listening — grew by more than 50 percent.
Streaming accounted for 34.3 percent of overall revenue in the world’s largest music market, narrowly edging out permanent digital downloads on platforms such as iTunes.
However, despite streaming’s rapid growth, the industry’s overall revenue last year rose a mere 0.9 percent to US$7 billion.
CD sales and digital downloads slipped with revenue from albums on CD, long a staple of the industry, down 17 percent in revenue.
The recording association, while praising the new source of growth from streaming, said that the revenue setup from the sector was not keeping pace.
The industry group, without explicitly condemning companies, clearly was pointing the finger at YouTube and the free tier of Spotify, which make money through advertising.
“We, and so many of our music community brethren, feel that some technology giants have been enriching themselves at the expense of the people who actually create the music,” association president Cary Sherman said in an essay on the annual figures.
“We call this the ‘value grab’ — because some companies take advantage of outdated, market-distorting government rules and regulations to either pay below fair-market rates, or avoid paying for that music altogether,” he said, also renewing longtime criticism of US rules under which radio stations do not need to pay artists.
One major bright spot was vinyl, whose sales went up by nearly a third amid a resurgence of interest by hardcore collectors, reaching a level last seen in 1988 before the rise of CDs.
While vinyl remains relatively niche, the format has been picking up and was worth more than a quarter of the value of CD albums last year.
The US$416 million generated by vinyl accounted for more than all the revenue brought in by billions of advertisement-supported free streams.
The music industry has not yet released global figures for last year.
Streaming has risen at different paces, making rapid strides in Nordic countries, while Japan and Germany — the world’s second and third-largest music markets — remain strongholds of CDs.
KEEPING UP: The acquisition of a cleanroom in Taiwan would enable Micron to increase production in a market where demand continues to outpace supply, a Micron official said Micron Technology Inc has signed a letter of intent to buy a fabrication site in Taiwan from Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (力積電) for US$1.8 billion to expand its production of memory chips. Micron would take control of the P5 site in Miaoli County’s Tongluo Township (銅鑼) and plans to ramp up DRAM production in phases after the transaction closes in the second quarter, the company said in a statement on Saturday. The acquisition includes an existing 12 inch fab cleanroom of 27,871m2 and would further position Micron to address growing global demand for memory solutions, the company said. Micron expects the transaction to
Nvidia Corp’s GB300 platform is expected to account for 70 to 80 percent of global artificial intelligence (AI) server rack shipments this year, while adoption of its next-generation Vera Rubin 200 platform is to gradually gain momentum after the third quarter of the year, TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said. Servers based on Nvidia’s GB300 chips entered mass production last quarter and they are expected to become the mainstay models for Taiwanese server manufacturers this year, Trendforce analyst Frank Kung (龔明德) said in an interview. This year is expected to be a breakout year for AI servers based on a variety of chips, as
Global semiconductor stocks advanced yesterday, as comments by Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) at Davos, Switzerland, helped reinforce investor enthusiasm for artificial intelligence (AI). Samsung Electronics Co gained as much as 5 percent to an all-time high, helping drive South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI above 5,000 for the first time. That came after the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose more than 3 percent to a fresh record on Wednesday, with a boost from Nvidia. The gains came amid broad risk-on trade after US President Donald Trump withdrew his threat of tariffs on some European nations over backing for Greenland. Huang further
HSBC Bank Taiwan Ltd (匯豐台灣商銀) and the Taiwan High Prosecutors Office recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to enhance cooperation on the suspicious transaction analysis mechanism. This landmark agreement makes HSBC the first foreign bank in Taiwan to establish such a partnership with the High Prosecutors Office, underscoring its commitment to active anti-fraud initiatives, financial inclusion, and the “Treating Customers Fairly” principle. Through this deep public-private collaboration, both parties aim to co-create a secure financial ecosystem via early warning detection and precise fraud prevention technologies. At the signing ceremony, HSBC Taiwan CEO and head of banking Adam Chen (陳志堅)
RSS