AUDIO STREAMING

Future

Technology

On the mobile part there are still a lot to do. The car company BMW has, together with the music service MOG, developed a car music streaming technique that is integrated with the car. At the same time Ford is together with Spotify trying to get voice commands and music streaming together in their cars. As the mobile network is rapidly expanding in bandwidth and availability mobile music subscribers are expected to be around 160 million in 2016.

Internet capacity in a near future will make lossy codecs obsolete since PCM will be easy to transmit in real time.

Business Models

From the providers points of view we see that the most important steps at this stage will be:

• Continue spreading the services globally in order to have a bigger pie to share with artists and labels.
• More efficient piracy damage control (will never be possible to be efficient for tech-geeks)
• Strengthen the position as mobile and cable/IP TV music partners
• Keep improving the coolness factor by creating close ties with social networks
• Improved service quality as internet bandwidth grows either by using higher bit-rate files or moving to lossless codes like FLAC.

There are rumours in the Industry that Apple will also move into the Music Subscription business at any time which will certainly make a huge impact in the overall consumer appeal and build up the coolness factor.

Other factor that may help this business is the migration of Home PCs/Laptops to a 21st version of the old Dumb Terminal Computer with most of the storage made by cloud computing (see the continuous growth of services like DropBox, Skydrive or GoogleDrive).

Global Forecasted Growth for the Mobile Music Streaming market