Google Music Bucks The Trend With Growing Downloads

Streaming music services like Spotify have caused a big ripple in the industry, influencing everything from legit music downloads to piracy rates. Despite this, Google Music has seen growth among its download sales alongside an uptick in its streaming service's user base. The growth runs counter to the industry's overall faltering, with such sales earlier in 2014 seeing a year-on-year drop of 13-percent. This follows closely on the heels of Taylor Swift having her catalog pulled from Spotify, taking a jab at the nature of streaming music services.

The information comes from Google's Vice President of Global Music Partnerships Zehavah Levine, who recently discussed the matter at the SF MusicTech conference and to the folks at TechCrunch. Though Levine couldn't comment on whether per-user download sales were on the climb, she did have this to say:

We launched our store a year and a half before our subscription service. If you look at our subscribers who all came after our store, more of our subscribers buy music after becoming a subscriber than stopped buying music after becoming a subscriber. We're not seeing cannabilization ... We are still in a world where more people are buying music than subscribing. We're going to be in a world that supports both access and ownership for many years. There is room for both models.

In regards to record music revenue, Levine said 67-percent of it came from sales in 2013. Overall, despite the proliferation of ad-supported and subscription-based music streaming services, many consumers are still flocking to digital music downloads, and for Google at least, it doesn't appear that'll be stopping any time soon.

SOURCE: TechCrunch