Brief news items and worthy reads from around the web:
The Wall Street Journal published a report about YouTube’s financial contributions to parent company Google. Even though YouTube is considered a top provider of online music content, unnamed sources said that the video service did not contribute to earnings last year. It did pull in about $4 billion, but with the bulk of traffic coming from links and embeds rather than visits directly to YouTube.com, the company may be challenged to find a more effective path to profit margins.
James Howdle, operations manager at [PIAS], wrote a blog post about his streaming predictions for 2015. The indie music company found that streaming income overtook downloads income in 24 international markets. “I think we will reach a point of equilibrium where physical sales continue to generate a significant proportion of sales while streaming becomes the dominant form of digital consumption,” he wrote.
The IFPI announced today that Friday will be the global record release day. CEO Frances Moore wrote a blog post explaining the benefits of this approach to releasing all new music worldwide on the same day of the week. The big perk is an effort to avoid piracy that an extended release allows, but Moore also said that the single release date was what music consumers want. That could be true, but Billboard collected some of the critiques of this change from within the industry.