How Music Streaming Is Changing The Music Industry

Streaming is more popular than it always has been, with millions of us paying for subscriptions. And then what exactly is music streaming, and how has it afflicted the industry?

For millions of people all over the world, listening to music means streaming music. Our article on the history of music distribution can fill you in on how we got here. But the important affair is streaming is here to stay, at to the lowest degree for the foreseeable future. It'south very probable that you employ information technology yourself, so how exactly does it work?

How music streaming works

Most streaming platforms offering up an amazing library of songs, albums and playlists. All of these songs tin can theoretically exist played by every user at ane time over the net, no matter where they are, and no matter what device they are using. From a technical standpoint, streaming works past sending (or, well, streaming) information from a server to an individual player. The bodily song exists on the server as a raw file. Raw files are huge and detailed, so they have to be compressed in lodge to travel over the internet instantaneously. When the stream reaches your device, it will decode the compressed data using an app or plugin.

Considering the raw files are compressed for transmission, some debate that music streaming is lower quality than other formats like CDs, vinyl records, or even digital downloads. This is broadly true. Spotify'due south default streaming quality is 160 kbps. A regular MP3 file is normally 320 kbps (the aforementioned equally Spotify'south optional "high quality streaming" setting). CDs are usually one,411 kbps.

The success of music streaming has proven that listeners do not necessarily prize quality over quantity and convenience. The sheer number of songs available, and the ease of finding and listening to them is the real appeal. And information technology'south become and so popular, that the whole industry has had to reorganise around it: in 2019, streaming numbers topped a trillion for the commencement time in history, and in March, it was estimated that 80% of revenue from recorded music was generated by streaming.

How streaming has impacted artists

One of the major ways streaming has affected artists' lives is through royalty payments. Though streaming is a step upwards from illegal downloads, which obviously earn artists no coin at all, these services requite notoriously little to the artists, producers, songwriters and record labels who provide them with music. Our article on artists and streaming services covers the topic further, but needless to say it has inverse the way musicians make music. For many, lower royalties from recordings has meant a shift towards live performing as the master means of making money.

Despite this, a Wall Street Periodical study has found that artists are releasing more than music than they e'er have. Experts put this down to the ease of recording, releasing and marketing music in the digital era, a lot of which is driven by streaming.

How streaming has changed the charts

It's clear that streaming a song once is non the same as buying a CD single, or even downloading a rail digitally. So instead, the UK Official Chart visitor equates 150 streams to one sale. The specific number is quite arbitrary, simply it does make some sort of intuitive sense. The biggest upshot this throws upwardly, though, is the problem of extremely pop artists populating the charts with not-singles. This could theoretically accept been a problem in the digital downloads era. In practice, it but became an upshot a few years back, when Ed Sheeran's anthology ÷ propelled all 16 of its tracks into the singles chart. A new rule was introduced to stop this happening, but this incident demonstrates the fragility of the organization. Music streaming has changed the industry in many ways, and some segments are still figuring out the best way to adapt.