Unlimited-access music subscription services will take almost a third of consumers’ digital music spending by 2015, analyst firm Gartner reckons.
Its finger-in-the-air forecast, above, anticipates revenue from services like Spotify, Rdio, Rhapsody and Mog will, some time in 2013 or 2014, surpass that from personalized music radio services like recently-listed Pandora (NYSE: P), which it reckons will decline.
It forecasts modest growth in a la carte digital downloads, which have already flat-lined in the States, and the highest growth coming from Latin America, the Middle East and Africa – an assumption that depends on the such services successfully launching to discourage music piracy there.
Alongside modest growth in global consumer digital music spending, Gartner sees a third ($5 billion) being wiped off global CD sales between 2010 and 2015 (release).
On behalf of unlimited-subscription music services, Facebook has now published growth figures they have experienced after ensuring their users’ listening habits are flooded out in to Facebook’s new live feed…
- Spotify: “Added well over 4 million new users since f8.”
- Earbits: “Saw a 1,350 percent increase in the number of users becoming fans of the band they’re listening to.”
- Mog: “246 percent growth in Facebook users since f8.”
- Rdio: “30x increase in new user registrations from Facebook.”
- Slacker: “More than 11x increase in monthly active users in the month following f8.”
- Deezer: “Added more than 10,000 users per day since finalizing their Open Graph integration.”
Spotify and Swedish multi-play telco Telia, which signed a deal to bundle the music service in October 2009, have renewed the arrangement for a second two-year period.
Subscriptions sold through Telia grew threefold in the last 12 months – a whole quarter of Spotify Premium subscribers in Sweden were acquired through Telia.
Record label bosses in Sweden credit Spotify and its Telia partnership, alongside piracy action, for reducing unauthorised downloading and helping restore revenue to the industry.