Canadian collecting society Socan says that Canada is home to around 7.8m music subscribers, or 22% of the country’s total population, after Nielsen figures revealed a 31.2% increase in on-demand audio song streams in Canada last year.
Socan CEO Eric Baptiste, talking in our Canada Country Profile, cautions that that Socan works with total subscriber numbers, “which do not necessarily reflect the total number of individuals who have access to subscriptions”. Nevertheless, these figures seem promising for a country that took to streaming late.
More worrying for the Canadian music industry is the fact that consumption of on-demand video songs grew faster last year (at 59.7%), than on-demand audio song streams (31.2%), as the Value Gap reared its ugly head once more. “Despite the wide availability of subscription music services, many consumers still turn to user-upload services like YouTube to listen to music,” Music Canada president and CEO Graham Henderson says in our Country Profile. “35% of respondents to a 2018 IFPI survey cited the availability on YouTube of the music they want as a major reason for not using paid audio subscription services.”
Image by abdallahh (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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