[meibo]

It's ubiquitous. It's the only way people listen to music - there's nothing else, bar the few nerds that still have their fb2k library or vinyl collection. I think it's easy for people to forget that having legal, instant access to all the music on the planet absolutely wasn't the norm a decade ago.

[sokoloff]

> It's the only way people listen to music - there's nothing else

It’s far from the only way people listen to music. I listen to music on FM radio way more than I do free streaming services (mostly Amazon music’s free tier) for the overwhelmingly majority (essentially all) of my music consumption, and have no user-paid subscriptions. Both are ad-supported and probably pay little to artists, similar to paid streaming.

[idiotsecant]

Yes, there's probably someone somewhere listening to pirate shortwave radio broadcasts, too.

You're being pedantic. Most people do not consume FM radio as their main source of music.

[sokoloff]

The worldwide radio market revenue is about $35B/yr. I think that’s larger than the audio streaming market; the reference point I found for that was $25B/yr.

Granted, not all radio is music (nor is streaming), but (assuming I didn’t get the research wrong) radio is larger, making it at least slightly weird to call it a pedantic argument that the larger of the two markets even exists as a source of music for people.

[nalinidash]

>It's the only way people listen to music - there's nothing else, bar the few nerds that still have their fb2k library or vinyl collection

Not really.Other services exist, like Youtube music.

[fragmede]

hate to break it to you, but Spotify launched in 2008 right after the original iphone in 2007, so it's been a bit more than a decade.

[meibo]

Time flies! Though I guess it really reached critical mass in the early to mid 10s.

[tomashubelbauer]

I miss my foobar2000 layout with foo_facets.