Spotify revenue outpaces iTunes revenue by 13% in Europe
In yet another example highlighting the changing landscape of the music industry, TechCrunch reports that revenue generated from Spotify in Europe is now 13% higher than revenue generated by iTunes Music sales in Europe.
Kobalt, a company that helps collect music royalties on behalf of thousands of artists - including "half of this week's Billboard Top 10″ and musicians like Maroon 5, Lenny Kravitz, Dave Grohl, Max Martin, Bob Dylan, and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis - says that in the last quarter in Europe, revenues from Spotify streams were 13% higher on average than revenues from Apple's iTunes for its customers.
News that Spotify is slowly but surely generating more revenue than iTunes shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Just a few months ago, Spotify's Kevin Brown indicated as much during an interview with The Guardian wherein he said that it's "only a matter of time before Spotify is bigger than iTunes across Europe as a whole."
And just recently, the Wall Street Journal relayed that digital music sales on iTunes this year are down 13-14% across the board. What's more, you might recall that 2013 marked the first year digital music sales experienced a decline since 2003.
Apple of course has an ace up its sleeve with Beats Music, the on-demand music streaming service it acquired as part of its $3 billion acquisition of Beats. For those who haven't had the pleasure of using the Beats Music app yet, it's extremely similar to Spotify albeit with what is an arguably much more clean and intuitive user interface. Apple, though, has yet to truly integrate the Beats Music app into iTunes or into iOS. On that front, rumor has it that Apple is currently negotiating with music labels in an effort to lower the $10/month fee that typically accompanies on-demand music streaming services.
As Spotify continues to grow, Beats Music continues to fly under the radar. That said, hopefully we'll see Apple use its muscle to push Beats Music to the forefront sooner rather than later. Given the immense iOS userbase, think of how many users Apple could attract by simply making the Beats Music icon standard on the iOS homescreen and offering users a free week or two of a Beats subscription. As we've noted before, Apple just needs to convince a paltry 1.25% of its 865 million strong user base to sign up for Beats and, just like that, they'd already have as many paying customers as Spotify.
