Global Streaming Transforms Music But…

Streaming has globalised the entertainment industry, enabling artists like Diljit Dosanjh and Arijit Singh to reach diverse international audiences.

Diljit Dosanjh wore his Punjabi identity with pride on The Jimmy Fallon Show in April. He sang, danced and bantered with the confidence of someone whose concerts routinely sell out in Canada, New York, and the United Kingdom.

Arijit Singh was a delightful voice in Ed Sheeran’s global hit, Sapphire, last year. Streaming has homogenised the world of media and entertainment — from both the supply and demand sides — creating one big global market.

And Dosanjh, Sheeran, or BTS, among others are the products.

They are reaching audiences far beyond their ethnic or national identities, allying with other musicians and singers to bring diverse sounds, lyrics and music.

Music As Petri Dish For Entertainment

That brings us to the point of this piece. Music is a great way to gauge the future of entertainment.

It is, as this column has stated several times, the Petri dish of the business.

It needs little data and, therefore, little bandwidth to carry a music file from one part of the world to another.

This made it among the first businesses to be disrupted by the Internet and then streaming.

When MP3, a technology to compress music files, took off in the late 1990s, young people formed peer-to-peer networks for sharing songs ripped from compact discs, causing the business to collapse.

From $22 billion in global revenues in 2001, music fell to a low of $13 billion in 2014, going by data from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

iTunes (2001), YouTube (2005) and music streaming apps such as Spotify from 2016 onwards, helped change things.

They democratised access for both creators and listeners, bringing flexibility.

This, in turn, changed the economics of the business. From 2016, revenues started rising again, reaching almost $32 billion in 2025.

The business is doing well now. Across the world, streaming brings in 70 per cent of revenues, with the next-largest chunk, 16.6 per cent, coming from physical sales, which saw a growth rate of 8 per cent last year, thanks to booming vinyl sales.

Challenges: Duopoly and AI Fraud

There are, however, two huge challenges. One is the duopoly of YouTube and Spotify in most countries.

You could argue, as the IFPI does, that each market has a different set of dominant brands. It may be Apple, YouTube, Spotify, or a local streaming brand such as JioSaavn or the erstwhile Wynk in India.

But the fact remains that YouTube dominates the Indian music market, followed by Spotify.

These platforms have done a great job of bringing process, systems, and payment mechanisms for sharing revenues.

But in doing so, they have also created an imbalance. In a market of 178 million listeners , barely 14 million Indians subscribe to a streaming music service.

Note that video streaming had 272 million subscribers in 2025. In music, much of the economics is driven by advertising.

Every time a song is played, a label earns anywhere between 4 and 10 paise, against an estimated 50 to 90 paise globally.

This is a blended estimate across pay and subscription revenue share.

No matter how many million times a song is played, the 4 paise doesn’t amount to much, especially when it has to pay for everything from marketing to royalties.

Therefore, overall revenue growth, has always lagged behind consumption volumes.

At Rs 5,900 crore (Rs 59 billion) in revenue in India in 2025, music brought in less than 10 per cent of what TV did and just a sliver of digital media revenues.

The second challenge and one which Victoria Oakley, chief executive officer of IFPI, has been highlighting globally is fake plays.

You could use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to generate hundreds of fake songs with fake cover art, fake lyrics, fake melody, fake name of the band.

You upload these on streaming platforms.

Then you use AI bots to push up the number of streams to show that many people have listened to these.

That means the money that would otherwise have gone to real artists is going to someone spinning fake plays.

It is becoming industrialised through streaming farms. Some estimates put fake plays at 10 to 20 per cent of global streaming revenue.

Future Implications for Entertainment

Now extend this development to the rest of the media and entertainment business.

A digital duopoly of Google (which owns YouTube) and Meta (Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp) exists globally when it comes to video and publishing.

And every local industry is trying to tackle it in its own way.

Fake plays, however, is another cup of tea. Its ability to impact subscription-driven platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video or SonyLIV is limited.

That is because they commission their shows/movies.

That creates a gateway that fraudsters can’t pass. Then, there is the many gigabytes of bandwidth needed to create a fake movie/show, making it well nigh impossible.

Where it can cause havoc is on short videos on YouTube, on short video platforms such as Instagram or on micro-drama services.

In fact, on anything that is short — because these are low-bandwidth products, and many of the creators already use AI in the production process itself.

Note that some amount of copyright fraud was always there in music.

AI has given it wings. How long before it extends to short videos?

Photographs curated by Satish Bodas/Rediff