BERLIN, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Revenue from online music streaming services has surpassed the earnings generated through sales of traditional Compact Discs (CDs) in Germany for the first time, the Federal Association of the Music Industry (BVMI) announced on Wednesday.
According to the figures published by the BVMI, combined gross revenue achieved by streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music and Tidal increased by 35.2 percent to 348 million euros (405 million U.S. dollars) during the first six months of the year. Streaming hereby accounted for an unprecedented 47.8 percent share of the German music market.
During the same period, CD sales collapsed by 24.5 percent to 250 million euros. As a consequence, their total market share in Germany declined from 44.6 percent to 33.4 percent.
The CD was invented by the electronics companies Philips and Sony and first presented to the public at an exhibition in Berlin in 1981. In the following years, the technology enabled the global music industry to achieve record sales with German CD revenue reaching an annual peak of 2.3 billion euros in 1997.
The invention and popularization of the internet brought an abrupt end to this trend. New formats like MP3s and early online filesharing services such as Napster heralded a seismic shift in the industry which would witness the rapid digitalization of music consumption habits across the world.
The BVMI noted on Wednesday that the overtaking of CD sales by streaming in Germany did not come as a surprise, even though the country had been slower to adopt the services than many other countries. In Sweden, the home market of Spotify, the change of guard took place as early 2012, while streaming revenue surpassed CDs in the United States in 2015.
While the shift from CDs to streaming did not pose an inherent threat to the German music industry, the BVMI called for more regulatory action to ensure that Youtube, "de facto largest streaming service", paid the appropriate amount in license fees to artists.
Unlike subscription services like Spotify, Youtube earns significant revenue through online advertising while allowing consumers to listen and to watch music videos for free. The BVMI lamented, however, that the Google subsidiary still only paid out a fraction of the royalty payments distributed by its competitors.
