Recently at SXSW, Sean Parker apparently predicted that Spotify will overtake iTunes within the next two years—given the former’s present growth rate.  I am going to assume the active measure for comparison here is royalties paid during a year period, or revenue earned, not total number of active users or user accounts. Let’s check the math, [...]

Google tends to refer to a wide variety of music-related products as “Google Music.” When the bits hit the hard drive, however, you buy tracks from the Android Market, upload tracks to Google Music (locker), watch music videos on YouTube, and… you get the picture. And so, even though Google Music is one of the [...]

Following on a estimate of the music industry collections from UK Radio stations, I have done my best to estimate effective per spin per listener rates collected from US Radio stations. Importantly, the goal here was to estimate the effective value of each radio spin *per listener* so that rate can be compared to not [...]

In the context of a great deal of debate over the value of streams on new music services, Spotify in particular, I have been working on some back-of-the-napkin (or serviette) estimates of the value of not only listens per listener to purchased tracks, but also spins per listener on major radio broadcasters. This week, I [...]

Using Tunecore’s recently released sales data, I tried to estimate the distribution of sales for this collection. And, first off, many thanks to Jeff and Tunecore for releasing these data for the rest of us to investigate. It appears life in the long tail of music sales may be rather rough. DMN has one angle [...]