This may sound a bit cliché, but music really is the one thing that brings us all together. Some of us still remember the days of dubbing our favorite tracks to a blank cassette tape and then later lugging around binders full of burned CDs. The invention of the MP3 file changed everything and today nearly everyone carries hundreds of songs with them at all times, but take things one step further. Streaming services such as Last.fm, Pandora, Slacker, and Spotify, just a few of our favorites, have taken the hassle out of music management and let us get back to enjoying tunes both new and old. Analysts at ABI Research are predicting that by 2016 streaming music will be mainstream and that the methods people use today, dragging and dropping, ripping and tagging, will be antiquated.
“The number of subscribers to mobile music streaming services is expected to approach 5.9 million by the end of this year,” says analyst Aapo Markkanen. “ABI Research believes that number will exceed 161 million subscribers in 2016, meaning a compound annual growth rate of nearly 95%. Sometime in 2012 the Asia-Pacific area will become the largest regional market for mobile music streaming.” In Europe you can already get a sense of this shift starting to take place since Spotify really has revolutionized music, and that’s not hyperbole. The Swedish service has been due to launch in the United States for ages now, but it’s an uphill battle due to the push back from the record labels. When, if ever, we’ll see Apple offering a subscription service will be hailed as the day that paying a monthly fee for songs and albums will be deemed normal.
Are you using streaming music services to augment your listening experience or have they totally replaced your meticulously organized files and folders that you’ve been copying from hard drive to hard drive, year after year?