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Amazon Music is seeing positive results with its high-fidelity tier as Spotify and Apple Music will follow suit later this year.
This year, more big streaming services are offering a new way to listen to music that makes it sound richer than it has in ages. The question is, how many people will pay a premium for it?
Early results from Amazon Music, which launched its high-quality, lossless audio high-definition service in 2019, are promising. The company says that HD subscriptions ($12.99 a month for Prime members, compared with $7.99 for its standard Unlimited tier) have grown 100% globally year over year as of March. Amazon is also seeing a bump in engagement from customers upgrading to its HD option: Those subscribers streamed, on average, 11% more overall and 16% more on albums in the first 30 days after switching, and both the hip-hop and rock genres global market shares are 20% higher on HD than on Unlimited.
Friday, 30 Apr 2021 06:10 AM MYT
Eight million American Internet users illegally downloaded music from a peer-to-peer (P2P) site or ‘torrent’ network in 2020. ETX Studio pic
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NEW YORK, April 30 Music industry professionals were hoping that streaming would put an end to piracy. But it hasn’t worked out that way. One in five US internet users still download music files illegally, according to a new report by MusicWatch.
The illegal download and sharing of music files introduced by Napster, Limewire and the like led to a vision of piracy that was so pervasive that it was once thought to be unalterable. And then came the streaming platforms like Spotify. They worked hard to convince consumers that it was better to pay for music. A paradigm shift that led some commentators to believe that music piracy’s days were numbered.
The music industry has been fighting variations of piracy for several generations. This year marks the 30
th anniversary of the introduction of the Audio Home Recording Act, a bill passed in Congress which stipulated, among other things, a royalty to the recording industry on devices and media that could be used for copying audio recordings. Back in the day millions of Americans, armed with tape decks and inexpensive cassettes, traded and copied music albums.
A decade later many swapped cassettes for CD burners and ripped their way to massive collections. One in five internet users illegally downloaded music files from file sharing services such as Napster and Limewire.
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