The Rise of Streaming Music and Implications for Music Production

In this paper, we model the potential for streaming music, a non-durable product, to upend and displace durable music sales. As the popularity of streaming music increases producers will switch their focus to the non-durable channel. We identify conditions under which the changing industry will encourage musicians to release fewer, but higher quality songs, leading to market deepening and increased listeners. We find that increases on the extensive margin are larger than the intensive margin from this strategy. This result could extend to information goods increasingly provided as a non-durable product. Beyond a model of consumer utility and producer profit, we analyze the most played songs of the large streaming music platform, Spotify, and compare those results to traditional album sales using Nielsen data