RIAA stats show 17% rise in US recorded-music retail revenues

 RIAA stats show 17% rise in US recorded-music retail revenues

According to RIAA’s latest half-year figures, paid music-streaming subscriptions are the star of US industry body with a 17% year-on-year rise in recorded-music retail revenues in the first six months of 2017. That means $4bn of spending on recorded music in the first half of the year, up from $3.4bn in the first half of 2016. When converted to wholesale (i.e. labels’ cut) revenues, the RIAA’s figures show a rise of 14.6% to $2.7bn.

So, actually, this is big news: the US industry really is bouncing back from its long decline. In the calendar year 2016, retail revenues there grew by 11.4%, so the growth is actually accelerating. Streaming accounted for 62% of the $4bn of US retail revenues in the first half of 2017, with downloads accounting for 19%, physical sales 16%, and sync revenues 3%. A year ago, streaming’s share of the market was 47%. According to the RIAA’s report, US streaming revenues grew by 48% year-on-year to $2.5bn in the first half of 2017 - figures that include on-demand audio-streaming services, video-streaming services and revenues collected by SoundExchange from radio-like services like Pandora and SiriusXM.

Within this, paid subscription revenues shot up 61% to $1.7bn, and now account for 43% of ALL recorded-music revenue in the US. There were an average of 30.4 million paying music subscribers in the US in the first half of this year, up from 20.2 million in the first half of 2016.

The RIAA is also, for the first time, breaking down these revenues between ‘full-service’ and ‘limited-tier’ subscriptions - Spotify and Apple Music’s $9.99 tiers being examples of the former, and Pandora Plus or Amazon Prime Music of the latter - with the limited-tier services generating $225m of the $1.7bn subscriptions total. That’s 213.4% year-on-year growth though. The report claims that revenues from ad-supported on-demand streaming services grew by 37% to $273m. That figure includes Spotify’s free tier as well as YouTube and Vevo. The RIAA cites estimates of 140bn songs streamed on these services in the first half of 2017, while taking a potshot at YouTube for “unreported streams” that may mean the real figure is higher.

Other points of interest: download revenues fell by 24% to $757m but physical sales dropped by just 1% to $632m. It may not be long until the combined forces of CD and vinyl are worth more, again, than the downloads format that could have replaced them.