Spotify says it's 'a matter of time' before it overtakes Apple's iTunes in Europe
Streaming music service says it has added 1m active users in the UK alone in the last four months



Streaming music service Spotify has added more than 1m active users in the UK in the last four months, as it tries to overtake Apple's iTunes as the biggest digital music service in Europe. "Some of our partners are saying Spotify is now generating more revenue each month across Continental Europe than iTunes," Spotify's head of label relations in Europe, Kevin Brown, told industry site Music Week. "Given that download sales are declining and Spotify is growing rapidly, particularly in the UK, it is only a matter of time before Spotify is bigger than iTunes across Europe as a whole."

Brown added that a "significant amount" of the million new British Spotify users are paying for a subscription, rather than listening to its free, advertising-supported version. The growth has been sparked by marketing partnerships with Vodafone and the Sunday Times.

• Spotify said in March 2013 that it had 24 million active users
• The UK is one of Spotifys biggest markets 
• In 2013, streaming music services generated £103m of revenues in the UK according to figures from industry body the BPI
• Streaming accounted for just 10% of overall UK recorded music revenues in 2013

For now, Spotify versus iTunes is a fairly clear streaming versus iTunes comparison. But with Apple already having a streaming radio service – iTunes Radio – in a few countries, and tipped to launch a full Spotify-style "on-demand" streaming service later this year, the two companies are likely to be even more direct competitors in the coming years.

In my opinion I think that Spotify and music streaming services are rising in terms of subscribers and will continue to gain more and more users due to the simple fact that it's free and much more convenient to use than downloading songs. You are able to listen to music anywhere for free through a device connected to a network.

Print is not the future, but it's not the past either

The latest US figures on newspaper decline may be sobering, but pundits and managers alike are starting to despair of digital

Once a year the Newspaper Association of America pulls together its overall performance figures, so once a year we can see more clearly than ever which way the US press industry (hugely influential in terms of expected British and European performance) is heading. Current answer, for 2013 as for every year since 2007: down.

• Print advertising is 10% off the previous pace. 
• However this is still 2.8% worse than 2012
• Both print and digital ads together creates an income of about  $21 billion
• In under a decade, it decreased from $49 billion to $21 billion

Talking of decline, what about print? "We in the print business have given it up. [But] advertising probably works better in print than in any other medium; it represents the ultimate engagement… It came about because ad agencies made more money on other kinds of advertising. Now, no one knows how to create print ads."

In my opinion I think that print is in decline due to the fact that younger generations find it easier to access news content through new technology such as devices like smartphones. It comes down to the accessibility and what's more convenient for audiences to access their content. Despite saying that, there is a still an audience for print and therefore it's not completely dying/or will dye out anytime soon.