Distributor CD Baby says that it collected more than $125m of streaming revenues for its artists in 2020, which was 13.9% year-on-year growth.
As in 2019, Spotify accounted for the biggest share of those revenues: 40% in both years, with $43.9m in 2019 growing to $50.2m in 2020. Apple Music’s share also held steady at 18% of CD Baby’s streaming revenues, while Amazon Music’s grew from 10% to 12%. However, it’s YouTube Music that CD Baby called out in its stats, noting that its collections from the video service more than doubled last year: up 110.8% from just under $5m in 2019 to $10.5m in 2020. Which is impressive growth, no doubt, although to keep that in perspective YouTube Music was only 8% of total revenues in 2020 for the distributor.
What’s missing (from the figures shared with journalists anyway) are stream counts: it would be interesting to see how the DSPs’ share of streams compares to their share of revenues.
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