Music revenues up as industry re-discovers that people will pay for convenient services

Gizmodo brings the news:

New industry figures for 2011 say revenue from digital music surged by 25 per cent to £286 million, offsetting an £87 million drop in CD sales. As an extra economic boost, we’re turning away from glossy foreign music imports and buying more from British artists, who now account for 53 per cent of the music we buy — the biggest share since 1997…

So what exactly is dragging music fans away from piracy and towards legal options? The answer: we’re all lazy, and the music industry is finally smart enough to exploit it. Or to put it politely, streaming services have finally made torrents look like too much effort.

“It’s convenience,” Darren Hemmings, a former head of digital marketing at PIAS and now an independent consultant at Motive Unknown, told us. “Streaming services are now making access to music more convenient than ever, and with that I think people are finally seeing it as a viable alternative to piracy and CD purchases. Why buy something from Amazon and wait for it to be posted if you can simply add it on Spotify and listen immediately?”

The lesson isn’t just applicable to the music industry, as I pointed out in How the Tour de France encourages internet piracy.