Streaming saved pop music, but left classical behind

At the turn of the millennium, the music industry started a steady 15-year descent into a ditch. Music piracy had taken it down a hole, before streaming services, such as Spotify and its Apple, Google, Amazon and Tidal rivals, arrived to pull it out.

Today streaming has a 46.9 per cent share of global music industry revenue (IFPI) – in the USA, that figure is 75 per cent – and virtually all current revenue growth. Five years after Radiohead’s Thom Yorke described Spotify as “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse”, 2018 saw the third consecutive year of double-digit growth for the music industry, mostly thanks to streaming.

But the green giant’s streaming model hasn’t affected just the way we consume music. It has altered what we listen to, how music artists get