Beats Music Joins the Crowded Streaming Music Market

When recording artists as diverse as Sara Bareilles and Daft Punk gather to strut their stuff at the Grammy Awards on Jan. 26, it will be a welcome diversion for an industry that’s heading into another period of upheaval. The purchase of downloadable digital music, a format that is dominated by Apple’s iTunes and has propped up industry sales for a decade, is winding down. Streaming tunes on mobile devices is all the rage and may soon overtake downloadable music in terms of revenue.

The streaming music business, though, is one crowded jam session. Pandora Media, Spotify, Rdio, Songza, Google Play Music All Access, iTunes Radio, and others all vie for music lovers. The category is full of conflicting formats, pricing strategies, and features, and no dominant business strategy has emerged. Nor is music industry officialdom in love with the technology. Most ad-supported music subscription services are free (recording executives really hate free) and don’t generate industry sales. This crowd also pays what artists such as Radiohead front man Thom Yorke and Talking Heads founder David Byrne say are unfairly low royalty fees even as streaming services send out millions of songs over their server networks.