The main battlefield of the Internet: Streaming Music Service !

How do you get digital music? Do you pay the "Subscribe" mode from KKBOX, or "buy-out" music buying patterns of ownership from iTunes Store? Or both, or even mostly by YouTube?

If you still don't know the streaming music, now you may want to know!

We know that Apple's iTunes Store mode is the traditional buy and download, as well as the market leader.  But the trend in the past two years has begun to change. Recently, online streaming music service once again become a topic of market rumors. Big companies such as Apple, Amazon and Google plan to join an online streaming music market. Spotify, which has outstanding performance in recent years, recently announced its entry into the eight countries in Asia and Latin America. 

According to the Recording Industry Association (RIAA), companies such as Pandora, Spotify which provide music streaming service to take a subscription fee, combining with YouTube, have growth rate about 58% to 10 billion U.S. dollars last year; On the contrary, although digital download market is still larger (29 billion dollars), but it only grew 8.6%.

Streaming music service market size in recent years grows much more faster. In 2011, the revenue generated by the streaming music accounted for 9% of the U.S. music market and rose to 15% in 2012, an increase of more than 66%. (resource: RIAA)

Another report produced by the International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) shows that although Internet users in the United States prefer download purchase, there are more and more users in other countries such as Sweden (Spotify birthplace), South Korea and France prefer subscription music streaming service. (resource: IFPI Digital Music Report 2013)

Lack of community features, iTunes Store need to break

As a digital music leader in the United States, Apple iTunes has had no recipe in Community, especially after the end of their own short-lived "Ping" Music Community Services. Users can only use Facebook and Twitter to share. If a user wants to know friends in the iTunes Store heard which songs, he/she needs to directly ask them. On the other hand, Spotify's service is different. In addition to the "Radio" and its' community features, Spotify is deeper integration with social networking on Facebook (You should read "someone is listening to a song on Spotify"). In this way, the platform (Spotify) can grow and the user can find out more new songs.

Is it possible to dig gold mine at music streaming market ?

The ultimate goal of Business Services is for-profit. Despite the subscription-based music streaming service in the digital world is an important battlefield, Reuters analysis pointed out that - even music streaming service pioneer Pandora is just beginning to convert users to their profit. Thus, things are not so simple.

But in any case, the most important thing for the consumers is seamless and cross-device listening to music and finding more than enough music at the platform. No one likes the experience that you cannot find what you want heard on the iTunes Store. iTunes Store has finally landed in 12 countries in Asian market last year, and this year will probably be streaming music shine in the global market.