From Products to Consumption - Changes on the Swedish Music Market as a Result Of Streaming Technologies Daniel Johansson Linnaeus University, Sweden Department of Computer Science & Department of Economics
[email protected] Abstract Since the year 2009, the Swedish music market has changed drastically. In the first six months of 2013, 75 percent of total revenues to Swedish repertoire owners came from digital distribution. More than 90 percent of those revenues came from streaming. More than half of the population has a streaming subscription, and streaming has become the dominant format for consuming music on this specific market. As a result of this paradigm shift, changes have occurred in the Swedish music industrial system, as well as in user behaviors. This report examines how the Swedish music market has changed as a result of à la carte on demand streaming, explains the streaming model as such and give a picture of what these changes could mean for the future. 1. Introduction When Jordan Ritter, Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker released the Napster application in the spring of 1999, it was an eye-opener for the music industry.1 Although mIRC and Winamp, as well as other applications and services, had shown the strength of compressed digital music combined with people-to-people distribution, Napster proved that digital delivery over the Internet was about to change the world of recorded music fundamentally. During the last half of the 1980´s, as well as during the 1990´s, Swedish repertoire owners2 had seen a large increase in revenues for recorded music, as a result of the CD format as well as other factors (Arvidsson K., 2007; Johansson D., 2010; Fleischer R., 2012).