Streaming music on the ropes?
How the hell do you square these two stories? On one hand, as Tech Crunch points out, streaming music services are in trouble because their profits are too tiny- their costs to labels and publishers eat up most profits for them, leaving them barely able to survive financially. On other other hand, a recent report cited by Bloomberg News, says that while teens aren’t buying much as much anymore, they are tuning into streaming music services more and more to listen.
Just to understand, the very place that consumers are flocking to are being slowly bled to death. If and when these streaming services go under, don’t count on consumers to flock to online or offline stores to buy up music. Yet another example of the music biz killing off an outlet that they should be utilizing better since there’s a sizable audience there already. It’s pathetic, stupid and counterproductive. In other words, it’s par for the course…
Comments
It’s the depression. Wakey wakey. Most people I know are more worried about where their next meal is coming from. Par for the course? Not really.
Comment by Dave-O from in yer face! — April 5, 2009 @ 11:56 pm
Music belongs to the moderately to very wealthy and the people who steal.
Comment by Dave-O from in yer face! — April 6, 2009 @ 12:06 am
This seems to me like another effect of the massive undervaluation of online advertising. As discussed in the comments of your blog last week, the disparity in advertising costs between print and online seems to be anywhere between 30 and 100-fold. If we even took the lowest of those figures and multiplied streaming site advertising revenues by 30… we wouldn’t have any problems, would we?
That isn’t going to happen overnight, especially in a recession. But it does seem to me to be a critical anomaly in all of this.
Comment by Ally from Edinburgh — April 6, 2009 @ 8:26 am