Digital music services set new trend
1999 was the last year in which the music
industry had a rise in sales, but since then it all went downhill. The plummeting of cd sales on the one hand and the rise in illegal downloading on
the other have caused a drop in sales year after year.
This seems to have come to an end: in 2012
worldwide sales rose by a modest 0.3% to 12.6 billion euro. In the digital
segment sales in 2012 rose by eleven percent: at the moment 34% of all sales in
the sector are derived from digital music. Ads on Youtube and online radio also
bring in a fair amount of money.
Because services such as Deezer and Spotify are very flexible and user-friendly, they help people make the transition from
illegal downloading to paying services more easily. As the digital music industry is still
very much developing, it could be that this positive evolution as only just
begun. Spotify alone increased its reach from thirty to a hundred countries
over just a short period.
