Revenue from mobile streamed music service is expected to rise over 40% to $1.7bn in 2013, according to a report from Juniper Research.
The streamed music service revenues are anticipated to surpass the revenue from the full-track downloads as the operators’ partnerships with service providers are expected to drive the growth.
During the year, the US is expected to lead the market for mobile streamed music services, surpassing South Korea.
European operators have experienced increase in the mobile user spending, such as TeliaSonera in Sweden that combines Spotify with TV, mobile and fixed line services, while Germany has also seen the rise with O2 offering simfy and launch of Spotify by T-Mobile.
Juniper Research report author Windsor Holden said that historically, companies like Apple, Google and Amazon have focused on cloud music from a storage perspective; as a remote locker for downloaded tracks.
"Apple’s forthcoming iRadio service is likely to bring significant pressure to bear on the existing players and prompt competing offerings from the other major over the top (OTT) companies," Holden added.
According to the report, the digital piracy has a major impact on the monetisation of streamed music services and the torrent traffic has continued to increase in spite of the blocking orders on leading torrent sites.
The report also revealed that the mobile music services are context driven and evolving social aspects like sharing, activity feeds and follow options.
Revenues from legacy services such as ringtones and ringback tones are expected to further decrease as the ringtones in Western Europe now worth 2% of their peak value, the report said.
