Paid subscriptions have been the engine of recent growth in recorded music revenues, with the IFPI recently announcing that they grew by 21.9% in 2021, accounting for 47.5% of the overall market.
However, Apple aside, most of the biggest players in music streaming continue to have ambitious plans to grow their advertising businesses too. They’ll be cheered by the latest report from ad industry body the IAB, then.
The big figure is $189bn. That’s the value of the global digital advertising market in 2021 according to the IAB’s calculations. That’s up 35% year-on-year, although bear in mind the fact the Covid-19 effect in 2020 (although revenues still grew by 12.2% that year).
The relevant parts for the music industry are the IAB’s estimate that digital audio advertising grew by 57.9% to $4.9bn in 2021 – the highest year-on-year growth within the sectors covered.
Bear in mind that’s still just 2.6% of the total digital ads market: by contrast, digital video advertising grew by 50.8% to $39.5bn, while social media advertising grew by 39.3% to $57.7bn.
The IAB’s report doesn’t go into much detail about the audio side of things, beyond noting that 85% of digital audio ad revenues came from mobile listening rather than desktop listening, and that music advertising revenues specifically grew by 32.4% last year (but without an actual figure).
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