Yesterday, we wrote about a study in France claiming that streaming music is now more popular there than downloading it. Figures from NPD Group now support the suggestion that this will soon be true in the US too. NPD claims that 30% of Americans downloaded music in August, while 29% streamed it. A couple of months on, streaming may well have overtaken downloads, or at least reached a dead heat. But the big question, of course, is whether one is cannibalising the other. At first glance it seems not: downloads increased from 29% in March to 30% in August in terms of population penetration, while streaming went from 25% to 29% in the same timeframe. But that just shows how many people were doing it – not whether those 30% of downloaders were downloading less as a result of streaming. More research needed, in other words.
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