The audience for online streaming music from companies such as...
The audience for online streaming music from companies such as Pandora grew sharply in the last year, enough to displace the audience for CDs as the second-largest among American music listeners, the NPD Group said, based on data collected from…
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14,000 survey panelists. Still, terrestrial radio remains the top source of music for Americans, it said. “We expect this pattern to continue as consumers become more comfortable with ownership as defined as a playlist, rather than a physical CD or digital file,” said Russ Crupnick, senior vice president-industry analysis. By Pandora’s own count, it claimed a 6.55 percent share of all U.S. radio listening in October, up from 4.27 percent a year earlier. It said it had 59.2 million active listeners by Nov. 1. Add in services such as Spotify, Mog, Rdio and the music videos viewed on YouTube and Vevo, and the total audience for online streaming music increased 18 percent from last year to about 96 million people, NPD said. That’s half of all U.S. Internet users, it said. Though AM and FM radio are still America’s “favorite choice” for listening to music, the percentage of Internet radio listeners who also use terrestrial radio has dropped in recent years, NPD found. Among Pandora listeners, the percentage of people who listen to terrestrial radio has dropped 10 points since 2009, and the percentage who listen to CDs 21 points, it said. The increasing ubiquity of smartphones and Internet-enabled cars has contributed to this shift in listening, it said. About 34 percent of Pandora users are listening in cars either through their phones or an in-car connection, it said. These new services are increasingly filling terrestrial radio’s traditional role of introducing new music to listeners, NPD said. “Pandora and other music services are an increasingly important part of the music-discovery process,” Crupnick said. Such growth has not come without its critics. The Songwriters Guild of America, Songwriters Association of Canada, Music Creators of North America and European Composer and Songwriter Alliance criticized Pandora for seeking in Congress and in courts to lower the rates it pays composers to license their music (CD Nov 7 p11). “For the founders of a billion dollar business that is built completely on the backs of music creators to suggest that paying those creators four percent of their revenue is still too much should be an embarrassment,” said Rick Carnes, Music Creators of North America co-chair and president of the guild.