Bret Kinsella, Author at XAPPmedia

June 1, 2016

What Spotify’s Financials Tell Us About Streaming Audio Economics – Part 2

Yesterday, we explored the numbers behind Spotify’s tremendous growth in subscription and advertising revenue counterbalanced by its shrinking gross margins. Today, we will discuss where all of that money is going.

May 31, 2016

What Spotify’s Financials Tell Us About Streaming Audio Economics – Part 1

Spotify recently released data showing that it had surpassed $2 billion in revenue with an 8.7% net loss. However, these were far from the most interesting data points that became public. The near doubling of advertising revenue, the fall in effective monthly revenue per user and the contracting margins are noteworthy.

May 25, 2016

Triton Data Shows Continued Rise in Internet Radio Listening

Triton released its March 2016 Webcast Metrics Top 20 Ranker which showed a continued rise in Internet radio listening. This also represented the first month that Triton proactively broke out Average Active Session (AAS) growth rates for pure play and broadcast Internet radio and streaming services. While both showed strong year-over-year growth, broadcast showed a small decline since the beginning of 2016.

May 3, 2016

Mobile Advertising Growth Will Boost Internet Radio Revenue

Internet radio audience has grown quickly. The industry commands somewhere between 600 – 900 million monthly listeners globally depending on which analysis you choose to cite. In the U.S., 57% of the population listens monthly and 50% weekly. The growth will allow Internet radio and streaming music services to capture an increasing share of the $42 billion in mobile advertising forecasted for 2016.

April 28, 2016

streaming-service-royalty-payments-total

Do Music Streaming Services Pay Musicians? Yep. A Lot

A continuous string of comments from record labels and a few musicians might make you think that streaming services somehow don’t pay artists for their work. This is factually incorrect as a few recent announcements from Pandora, Spotify and YouTube attest.

April 18, 2016

Global Recorded Music Industry Revenues 2005-2015

IFPI Data Shows Streaming Growth, but How Much?

IFPI just released its annual Global Music Report and it always creates a lot of news, but little of it goes beyond the narrative forwarded by the report. However, as with all of these releases by recording industry associations it is often worthwhile to go behind the numbers to see what is really going on and the motives behind the narrative.

April 13, 2016

What Streaming Music Subscription Numbers Reveal About Ad-Supported Listening

A recent Digital Music News headline claimed, “There Are Nearly 90 Million People Paying for Streaming Music.” Its numbers add up to 87.5 million if you buy into two assumptions. First, that Apple Music will shortly grow from 11 to 15 million subscribers. Second, you must buy into the conclusion that Satellite subscribers are streaming subscribers.

March 30, 2016

The Vinyl Myth and Other RIAA Data Analysis Errors

RIAA leadership is once again mis-reading the organization’s own data to suggest that vinyl is a better revenue generator than ad-supported streaming. Vinyl actually accounts for about one-third the level of ad-supported streaming and about one-sixth of streaming revenue overall.

March 23, 2016

Pandora, Spotify, iHeartMedia in 2015 - Triton Digital

More Internet Radio Growth Analysis – the Triton Numbers

Triton Digital’s monthly Webcast Metrics Top 20 Ranker aggregates actual listening data reported by audio publishers. December's report shows a 13.3% rise in average active Internet radio listening sessions in 2015. So what does this mean for advertisers?