Future of the Music Industry

Just like technology today, it seems like the music industry is constantly changing and evolving. Maybe not to as high of an extent as technology, but certainly at a good pace. After looking through 2018's Global Music Report and thinking about what I've seen and heard, I do feel the music industry is straying away from physical and moving more towards completely digital. However, despite this, I feel the change is VERY slow, despite how quickly the music industry seems to be changing. I feel like there has been a sort of revival of owning and collecting physical media versus digital media since it can be enjoyable to have a collection, and record players with Bluetooth connectivity seem to be popping up everywhere. Eventually though, I do think that this will ultimately die down eventually and physical media will slowly fade out. It may still be a very long time until this happens, but I do feel it will happen. With 4.5% of physical revenue going down and download revenue going down by a whopping 20.5% according to the IFPI's Annual Global Music Report, it seems that once this change does finally happen, most music will be primarily found on streaming services such as Spotify, Pandora, and Soundcloud. However, I don't think this music will solely be held on these streaming services. Despite there being a 45.5% increase in paid subscription streaming according to this same report, I feel that saying that media will solely be on these platforms is unreasonable, simply because of how much of a revenue cut these streaming services take from publishers and songwriters. As the sale of physical media started to go down and the introduction of digital happened, songwriters, publishers, and even the band itself started earning less and less money due to these revenue cuts that services started to demand. I do feel that them putting their records onto services that charge for the album or individual songs, such as iTunes, would allow them to get more revenue since some of that money would go to the creators of the music, unlike Spotify which just has people paying for the subscription rather than the music itself.