Music streaming is significantly more popular in Scandinavia

One might easily believe that the transition from downloaded music to streaming is already finished. However, a new report from research firm Bernstein shows that the opposite is true.

Even though the numbers are from 2013 they still give a good picture how Scandinavia is radically different from the rest of the western world. In Sweden streaming services was responsible for 94 percent of total revenue for recorded digital music throughout the year.

To put this in perspective Germany, UK and USA were all in the range of 13-15 percent. Here downloaded music from e.g. iTunes is still by far the largest.

The numbers in the Bernstein report indicate that streaming services must cross a certain threshold, an estimated 50 percent of the market, before the total music revenues in a country break their downward trend.

In Sweden the trend was broken by 2011 and since then the industry has experienced rising sales.

The country that is most reminiscent of Sweden is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Norway where streaming has a market share of 84 percent. What the countries have in common is that they both stand behind their own streaming service: Spotify is from Sweden and Norway is behind Wimp.

The fact that streaming still only accounts for 13 percent market share in the huge US market could change this summer when Apple is expected to launch its new music service based on technology acquired from Beats.

This could also give an extra boost to the music market in the rest of the Western world since Apple tries to convert their iTunes customers who download music into streaming subscribers.