Research firm Juniper Research has published its latest report on the digital music market, complete with a big headline claim about revenues from ad-supported streaming music. The company claims that they’ll rise from $782m in 2015 to $1bn by 2017. So, is it right? Juniper makes a lot of predictions in all areas of technologies, and its numbers are often seen as more towards the optimistic end of the scale.
Yet much depends on how you define ad-supported music. Is it just the free tiers of audio streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music’s Beats 1 station? Are we including video services like YouTube and (potentially by 2017) Facebook? And what about brands spending money on streaming music in ways other than just buying audio ads? But also, compare Juniper’s $1bn-in-2015 figure to the IFPI’s numbers for 2014, when it estimated that ad-supported streams generated 9% of the $6.85bn of global digital music revenues – so $0.62bn. If Juniper is on the money, ad-supported streaming income will need to rise by 61% in 2015.
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