By 2021, the Paid Music Download Will Be Dead

Sources: Nielsen (2005-2015); Digital Music News projections (2016-2021)

Who downloads anymore? By 2021, the actual answer will be virtually no one, at least on a paid level.

Last year, paid song downloads dropped another 12.5 percent, according to preliminary details published by Nielsen Soundscan.

The reasons for this aren’t mysterious: last year, the number of music streams doubled to 317.2 billion streams in the US alone, thanks to explosive growth across Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music, among others. That is directly assassinating paid downloads, with Apple accelerating the plunge by aggressively pushing consumers towards Apple Music streaming accounts.

The rest, as they say, will be history, with downloads occupying a niche space in music listening experience, alongside CDs and other marginalized formats.

The math is stunning: right off the bat, a paid download accounts for at least 140 times the revenue of an equivalent stream, and that’s a best-case scenario based on aggressive per-stream royalty estimates. Independent labels, many of whom have wholeheartedly embraced streaming in the name of technological progress, will likely be the first group to suffer massive financial consequences.

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