Song Streaming In 2014

Several outlets are calling next year one of great significance for music streaming. Pandora, iHeartRadio, Spotify and other streaming services are expected to be in competition with numerous startups that will focus on niche services.

Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine are about to launch Beats Music that will focus on bringing mainstream audiences onto the streaming platform and introducing them to unfamiliar material. Deezer, from France, is coming to America. Google plans to add a subscription-based music/video streaming service to YouTube. British company Pure just started embedding on-demand streaming into its new sound systems, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, none of them have made a profit. Pandora pays half its revenue to royalties, and Spotify pays 70 percent. And streaming services only circle the moneymaking planet of iTunes. But there was a time when iTunes was the black sheep.

“We can’t put the genie back in the bottle – this is the way people want to listen to music,” Spotify COO Ken Parks told CNet. “The challenge is to get the entire planet on a path to eventually subscribe and pay something for music. The first task is to get them on the conveyor belt to paid consumption.”

To that end, MediaNet Digital is expected to launch 50 new streaming services next year – all niche marketed, with sub prices as low as $2.99 a month.

“You look at all of these services, they’re almost all exactly the same, targeting exact same consumers,” 7digital President Vickie Nauman told the WSJ. “You don’t have to be a genius to say, what sense does it make to try to do the same thing? We’re trying to filter companies by how they’re bringing audiences into the market that aren’t already on these.”

She said the risk is if a person subscribes to a service, and it fails a year later, sites that offer free music could begin to look more attractive and streaming could lose its momentum.