Audio streaming increasingly important worldwide
According to a recent IFPI report, copyright infringements remain a key challenge for the music industry worldwide: 40 percent of consumers listen to music via unlicensed services. This group also includes the 35 percent of Internet users who use so-called stream rippers.
According to the Music Consumer Insight Report 2017 "Connecting with Music" by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), more than one in two (53%) 16 to 24-year-olds worldwide already "rip" music. Germany is below the global average in these areas: here, 30% of users obtain musical content from unlicensed sources and a total of 26% use stream rippers.
According to the report, 13 to 15-year-olds have an intensive relationship with music: despite the large number of competing media, 85% of them stream music, 79% via video streaming services and 67% via audio streaming services, an increase of 13 percentage points compared to the previous year. Of the young audio streamers, 37% are subscribers to paid services, while 62% stream ad-supported music.
User-upload video services such as YouTube have the largest share of on-demand streaming time, but do not give creators and their partners a fair share of the revenue, writes the IFPI. Yet 85 percent of YouTube visitors now use the site to listen to music every month, 76 percent of them even stream music they already know.
