France’s population is taking to music streaming in a big way – but the much talked-about online video ‘value gap’ is significantly harming this growth.
According to figures communicated by BPI and Snep, roughly the same number of music streams were played in the UK and France in 2015: 54 billion in the former, 50 billion in the latter.
Yet when you crunch these numbers further, something isn’t right.
In 2015, the UK’s 53.7 billion streams consisted of a 50 – 50 split between audio and video.
Yet in France, the breakdown between audio and video streams was an unbalanced 35% – 65% split in favour of video.
While the audio segment generated €93.6 million in gross value, the video segment yielded a comparatively ridiculous €10.4 million euros – just 10% of the French streaming market.
Therefore, in 2015, an audio stream generated in France an average 0.0052 euro revenue, 17 times greater than the average revenue of a video stream.
If video had been aligned with audio, France’s streaming market value would have weighed in at €260 million – 2.6 times what it really was.
As previously reported, France’s recorded music business (across digital and physical formats) declined by 7% last year, to to €426m.
Overall streaming revenues managed to grow 44.6% – despite income from ad-funded services falling 8.4% in the year.
Revenue from ad-funded audio services – including Deezer and Spotify’s free tiers – dropped 8.1% to €12.05m.
And income from ad-funded video services – including the likes of DailyMotion, Vevo and YouTube – dropped by 8.8% year-on-year to just €10.06m.
Subscription saved the day, with premium audio services growing 72% in revenue terms to €81.77m.
Meanwhile, new Q1 2016 figures from the UK and France show more massive growth of audio streams in both countries, showing they continue on competing well.
In the UK, new heights have been reached recently with Drake’s ‘One Dance’ rocketing at a record 9- million streams in a single week.
In France, Snep reported a staggering 70% increase in Q1 period-to-period total audio streams, at 6.1 billion.
Even though the record for most streams in a week has been hovering at 2m+ for some time, more and more songs have been streaming beyond the 1 million barrier in the same week.
Three weeks ago, the top 14 streaming songs in France were all above that mark for the first time ever.
All figures courtesy of The Official Charts Company, Snep and chartsinfrance.com
This article was created for MBW by Elia Habib.
Follow Elia on Twitter here (@EliaHabib1) and check out his blog all about the French music market through here (www.muzhit.com).Music Business Worldwide
