How YouTube's Domination of Streaming Clips the Market's Wings (wordpress.com)

New report from Midia Research firm looks at music fans' behavior in the third quarter of 2018. From the report: YouTube is the dominant music streaming platform, with 55% of consumers regularly watching music videos on YouTube, compared to a combined 37% for all free audio streaming services. YouTube usage skews young, peaking at nearly three quarters of consumers under 25. Although YouTube leads audio streaming in all markets -- even Spotify's native Sweden -- there are some strong regional variations. For example, emerging streaming markets Brazil and Mexico see much higher YouTube penetration, peaking at close to double the level of even traditional music radio in Mexico.

Indeed, radio is feeling the YouTube pinch as much as audio streaming. 68% of those under 45 watch YouTube music videos compared to 41% that listen to music radio. The difference increases with younger audiences and the more emerging the market. For example, in Mexico YouTube music penetration is 84% for 20-24 year olds, compared to 37% for music radio. Streaming may be the future of radio, but right now that streaming future is YouTube.

Comments

Why do people do this

[DarkRookie2]

I still don't understand why people do this.
Most of them on there aren't even from the band. Just crappy fan uploads.
Most have bad sound quality. The music on my system sounds a lot better.
A lot harder to create a playlist. Or at the very least, a lot slower.
Video also burns thru a lot more data than audio if that is a concern for you.

Re:Why do people do this

[bobbutts]

Because everything is there for free. I made a playlist recently and had to download some of the songs from youtube because I couldn't find them anywhere else.

Re:Why do people do this

[jellomizer]

For a lot of people music is a background thing. Today Internet WiFi signals are stronger then most Radio Signals especially inside a building, plus they will already have a YouTube compatible device on them most of the time.

It is just more convenient especially if you are not expecting a lot.

Re:Why do people do this

[alvinrod]

Convenience mostly. YouTube has almost everything and since they gave the copyright owners the ability to collect from something another person uploaded, there’s not much incentive to remove the so-called illegally uploaded content.

Anything I could find on a streaming platform I can find on YouTube. However, the reverse is not true. There’s plenty of things I can listen to on YouTube that no streaming service offers. If your musical tastes stay outside of what’s popular, YouTube is a far better bet for finding it. Google’s algorithms might even play some other related music that you’ll really like but wouldn’t be able to get elsewhere as well. YouTube is also surprisingly good for music discovery as well.

Re:Why do people do this

[Aighearach]

Most k-pop bands upload their official music videos to youtube.

Because they're good at merchandising, that's why they're more profitable (on a per-fan basis) than western music groups.

And music videos have no value. Nobody ever made a bunch of money selling DVDs of music videos. Madonna makes a bunch of money selling DVDs of concerts. But the official music videos get almost all of their value from their ability to promote the band.

Fan videos of concerts add a fantasy element, it feels more like you're at a concert when you can see the top of the head of the person in front of you, and the video is bouncing around with the music, etc.

Re:Why do people do this

[lgw]

There are ads on your internet? You need a better internet!

Re:Why do people do this

[epine]

If everyone blocks ads, all of the high-quality Internet services we use will go away, or become subscription services. Those who long for the pre-ad Internet do not remember the pre-ad Internet.

You're not much into round-trip thinking, are you?

Without the captains of industry expending all this money on advertising, the products we buy would be a lot cheaper, and the money we all save on our merchandise could be spent directly supporting the channels we most prefer, which—once adequately supported—would probably have a liberal shoulder for free riders in any case.

System A: a lot of money spent on advertising production and distribution, with no direct benefits (except for the small number of people with narrow and unusual interests who actually enjoy the ads for their own sake).

System B: no money wasted on advertising production or distribution. All of the money invested in content creation and product manufacture.

Yet, somehow, in System B, with less overhead, there's not possibly enough to go around.

It might not play out this way, but any coherent economic theory needs to explain how eliminating a dead weight cost (advertising) might leave things worse (in aggregate).

Hint: it probably starts with the observation that the peer community is too effective at getting the word out about which products suck and which products don't, and Big Cheese is not going to simply sit around and stand for that.

And so we get these clusterfuck revenue models, where subjecting yourself to caustic brain-rot tens of thousands of times over the course of your life is portrayed as a marginal, collective good.

Well, I, for one, am not buying into this tube-steak sizzlegasm.

It's not clipping wings

[Anonymous Coward]

It's showing the market what society wants.

This is a good thing.

The title of this post is just a dog whistle calling on socialists to clamor for governmental regulation by know-nothing, paper-pushing, bureaucrats who fancy themselves to be Intelligent Designers. In our Universe, there is only Evolution by Variation and Selection, the most humane and robust form of which is voluntary interaction (i.e., a free market; i.e., a market free from the meddling of coercive, would-be central planners).

Re:It's not clipping wings

[jellomizer]

History has often shown us in terms of products, the best product is rarely the one that wins the standard. But the one that is more accessible.

Back in the 1980s for Desktop PC you probably couldn't beat an Amiga in terms of technology and price. However the IBM PC Compatible desktop won, because with a hacked BIOS it was easy to make a fully compatible system, and sell many units all PC Compatible, with a larger selection software titles, from teams of developers who used these PC from work, and wrote software on them after hours.

Re:It's not clipping wings

[tomhath]

the IBM PC Compatible desktop won, because with a hacked BIOS it was easy to make a fully compatible system, and sell many units all PC Compatible

Well then, which computer really was "best"? I suggest that the PC's modular and somewhat open architecture made it the better product.

But GP's point is well taken - the problem to solve is how to pay content creators the royalties they deserve. Posting music without the right to do so and collecting advertising revenue from it is theft. If YouTube is the platform consumers prefer then solve the problem with compensation instead of trying to legislate streaming over YouTube.

Re:It's not clipping wings

[farble1670]

the problem to solve is how to pay content creators the royalties they deserve

It is quite the opposite. It's easy for copyright holders to flag content. It's a completely automated system. You can read about it here:
https://support.google.com/you...

Platforms such as Facebook are much, much worse. Someone can steal your video from YouTube and upload it to Facebook and it'll be there for weeks before Facebook gets around to taking it down. You can learn about that here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

No advertisements

[110010001000]

The reason Youtube is used is because there are no advertisements if you use an adblocker. Once Google closes that loophole it won't be as dominant. That is why Google lets people who use Adblockers use Youtube.

Re:No advertisements

[Aighearach]

Please advise on how I can block ads [without dolling out cash], on Android.

1) Do not install the app at all. Just say no.
2) Use firefox
3) Install either uBlock Origin or Adblock Plus
4) Use the youtube website through the browser.

Never install apps.

Re:That article read like it was an ad copy

[110010001000]

No "research group" produces "research" for free. These groups are paid to come up with whatever conclusions they are paid for. In addition they pay to get their "research" published to news outlets. The short answer is: money.

It's piles of servers.

[RyanFenton]

I understand the mindset - if there's no marketplace for new businesses, how do we get improvements over time?

The problem is that businesses aren't really valid laboratories for testing ideas. They fail for reasons unconnected to their base ideas more often than not, and VERY rarely engage in any actual forms of valid research anymore.

Individuals test ideas, and more specialized groups work on promoting those ideas - not really business in general.

In this case, Youtube is basically a specialized use of the very large pile of random computers Google houses en mass, in order to advertise to people.

It's like if you had a bazaar in your town, selling cheap knick-knacks at random prices - and then a big warehouse store came in, offering better quality knick-knacks for cheaper with less hassle for everyone, and less overhead waste.

It's not some great tragedy that a simplified business wipes out those businesses - perhaps a set of small regrets - but you're not going to lose much actual innovation because of that shift to better organization and efficiency.

Rather, instead of more rinky dink folks trying to hawk dodads, you get more rinky dink folks trying to band together make something that will be good enough to sell at the big store, or working at companies that already found a niche.

If you want innovation - then focus on actually rewarding innovation, not pretending like a market is going to produce it - markets only innovate on a fairly small window of short-term interests. Bring back actual research organizations as a part of the economy.

Pretending that you can innovate better than Youtube by just going back to a diaspora of yet more scammy small-scale operations - that's wishful thinking in my book.

You have to have a better idea tested and reliably scalable before it's worth crushing a working system. Youtube is horrible in some ways - but there's valid reasons folks want to use it more than most anything else.

Ryan Fenton

Non-"Buffering" 3rd-Party Players?

[bill_mcgonigle]

OK, it's 2019. I still see most competitors to YouTube stutter, break up, and lag with terrible buffering - news sites, Vimeo, VLC even, etc. Network quality simulators have been around for more than a decade; in general the pipes are plenty fast even if not uniform in capacity, and the browsers all all plenty fast now.

So, what gives? Is anybody trying? Is there anything available that can give even close to as good an experience as YouTube on a typical dodgy network connection? I'll encode the h.264 however it wants it and host it on a QUIC server if need be.

Re:Non-"Buffering" 3rd-Party Players?

[110010001000]

The reason competitors have quality issues is because Youtube spends a ton of money on deploying data centers and they don't. Competitors can't match it due to the cost and Youtube is likely still losing money, but it doesn't really matter to Google because the data gleaned from it adds to their dominance in providing profiles to advertisers. It probably costs around $5 billion a year to run Youtube. Unless you have a business model to get that money back, you aren't going to compete.

What is music radio?

[gosand]

Ohhh, you mean commercial radio. Because that is all they seem to play. And when they aren't playing commercials, they are playing
    1. a song I had heard 1000 times 25 years ago that I hate
    2. a song I had heard 1000 times 25 years ago that I like, and I have
    3. some awful dreck that makes me turn the channel or turn it off

When I listen to music, it is from my digital collection. If I want to find something new, I can find it on a few youtube channels I frequent. If I want to buy it, I will buy a digital copy - or in rare occurrences a CD - from online retailers like bandcamp, cdbaby, or from the artist directly.

I don't use any streaming services, I have no need for them beyond finding music worthy of downloading.